Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. The Waste Books. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 2000.
This is exactly what happened in Scotland, and accounts for the large number of Scottish emigrants who populated many countries of the world.
The president was right. There is enough food to go around. The problem however is logistical, economic, and political. Some countries use food as a weapon to keep their own people under control. The major problem is the distribution of the food. It has to be transported from where it is gown to where it should be consumed. Much food in the third world rots because the transportation system cannot move the food efficiently enough. Even when food is donated to nations, the free or cheap food undercuts the local farmers who go out of business and there is even less food the following year.
So often diplomatic negotations are ongoing about “solutions” to world problems while people in crisis do not get any immediate help which is needed.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.
