John McCarthy Quotes

When people are hungry, when a mother or father is facing a child that they can't feed, you can't ask that family to lay down their arms.

No agitation for political reforms could be carried on by a plague-stricken and starving people. Food was what they needed and most urgently demanded. The political argument died away, drowned in cries and petitions for relief, lost in weepings and wailings for the victims who were perishing in hundreds by the roadsides, in the fields, and in their bare and empty houses.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

The cry of the poor for bread has been answered by warheads!

[Starving] women, children, the elderly, they don’t know anything about four-party talks. They want to eat. They want to live.

It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics.

… there were days … when I came back from some scene of eviction so maddened by the sights of hunger and misery I had seen in the day’s work that I felt disposed to take the gun from behind my door and shoot the first landlord I met.

I did what sports were supposed to be like, and I was living in my car. So you know what, fine. I'm gonna talk a bunch of sh*t. I'm gonna pose in a couple of pictures. And I'm gonna break a couple of girl's arms, and I'm not gonna feel the least bit sorry about it because you know what? At least I can feed my dog.

A hungry man can't see right or wrong. He just sees food.

Hunger makes a fool of a man.

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.

The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows.

The economic and social decline of Zimbabwe is shocking and appalling. Life there is unrecognisable from that of the recent past. Each day is a struggle for basic survival.

But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive?

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.

Are some women and children going to die? Yeah. But it's doing the right thing. You got money, you sit around talking about peace. People who don't have money need some help.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

Poverty doesn't imply necessarily violence.

It's such a tragedy that man endures in killing his brother and his own kind, putting him in jail and insane asylums, letting him lay out in the street.

I worry about Zimbabweans. They bend, they bend, they bend, they bend - where do the people break? How long can they go on scrounging for food in garbage dumps and using the moisture from sewage drains to plant vegetables?

They went into stores to get food to stay alive. Looting isn't the right word. I call it survival.

Desperation is a fact of life in many poor, overcrowded countries.

Drag a $100 bill through a trailer camp and there's no telling what you will find.

People might not protest for overtly political or social causes, but when they can't feed themselves and their family, they will take to the streets.