Richard Ojeda Quotes

Being a mom, I am even more inspired to really help make a difference. I can't imagine what it would be like if my child didn't have a meal to eat.

When people said Africa would change me, I didn't understand what they meant. To see the poverty in the townships, for instance, is overwhelming. I found it heart-wrenching to see young children walking barefoot and hungry in the dirt. I'm the kind of person who wants to change the world right here and now, so I got frustrated.

I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid out the dead, the martyrs of the strike.

Being a mom, I can't imagine my child not having a meal. That's hard to digest.

A lot of people don't know what it's like to actually be hungry. I do. I've also slept on the streets.

I believe I could commit a crime. We all can. It depends on which situations we find ourselves in. In despair, I would steal food if my children were hungry.

To see those babies with no food for three of four days, old people sitting in the hot sun, when you see these poor people, you cannot help but being compassionate or affected.

My father would give his dinner to any hungry kids who walked by and then go in the backyard and pick weeds from the yard to eat.

Like the suffering child, gang members act out of their despair, and their actions are all the more alarming now for our not having heeded their cry long ago. The shortsighted neglect that keeps us locked up in our outrage has also kept us from viable solutions.

After you've cut back everything else, food is the last to go. I didn't mind putting an extra jumper on if I had food in the fridge. It was the point where I had an extra jumper on and no food in the fridge that I realised things had gone badly wrong.

It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper, it is a still less pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where one is to sleep.

If our kids were hungry, we'd step into slavery.

It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

Acceptable food rots while we are chased from bins behind restaurants, chased from sleeping on the street, chased from relieving ourselves unless we pay for food or gas, until finally we are so hungry, sleepless, smelly, constipated and beaten-down that we simply die of lack of will to live.

We are living in the 21st century, and children are dying of hunger, so how do we fight it?

If my children were hungry I should think I would steal to feed them.

Every day I've got to hear about unemployment and people starving.

There are teachers in the United States who cry in the daytime because they see a child or children who haven't eaten properly, children who haven't used soap in so long.

It's frightening to think about more sanctions. When I've met North Koreans in China, they've said to me, 'You have no idea how difficult our lives are. We live like dogs.' They wake up in the morning wondering what they're going to eat for dinner.

Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

There's this huge number of desperate people.

I used to sit in front of McDonald's and ask people for dollars to get me a cheeseburger. It was bad.