Charles Dickens Quotes

Oliver Twist has asked for more!

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

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

There is nothing remotely dignified about sorting through rotting trash to find something to feed your child, or asking someone for money because you have none (anyone who has contrived to give people money before they had to ask will never forget the look of gratitude in their eyes).

Hunger finds no fault with the cookery.

... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.

A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

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

Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.

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

It is said that man doesn't live by bread alone. Sometimes this is unfortunate, because people who cannot live by bread alone too often kill other people in consequence of the fights they get into.

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.

I find hunger more interesting than accomplishment.

I got up one Christmas morning and we didn't have nothing to eat. We didn't have an apple, we didn't have an orange, we didn't have a cake, we didn't have nothing.

I have stopped at farm after farm where lean, underfed women and sickly men repeated again and again the same story—little food and no opportunity to get more.

A starving man thinks first of satisfying his hunger before anything else. He will sell his liberty and all for the sake of getting a morsel of food.

To a man with an empty stomach food is God.

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

Big Beggarman

On my way back to Missouri I stopped in St Louis and I saw my first bread line – 200 starving men forming a gray line as they waited for food. The sight of them disturbed me.

Beggars cannot be choosers

If our beggars of England should, with so much ease as they, furnish themselves with food at all seasons, there would not be so many starved in the streets, neither would so many gaoles [jails] be stuffed, or gallouses furnished with poore wretches, as I have seen them.

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.

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