Thomas Pynchon Quotes

By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days.

6,000 people were killed, crippled, and wounded during the War of Independence. The economy was devastated - there was no milk, just milk powder. No eggs, but egg powder. Meat was only once a week.

...when we really get into hard times, where food is scarce or there is none at all, and so with clothing and shelter, money may be no good for there may be nothing to buy, and you cannot eat money, you cannot get enough of it together to burn to keep you warm, and you cannot wear it.

I think we're simply going to run out of Nature before we have a chance to destroy it.

People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can't sustain them.

The buffalo is all gone, and an Indian can't catch enough jack rabbits to subsist himself and his family, and then, there aren't enough jack rabbits to catch. What are they to do?

We face a dilemma because although everybody is better off than they've ever been at any time in our history, we've also got the biggest gap between the rich and the poor that we've ever had, and we've potentially got a planet which is going to go bust any day.

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

I think that the economy, and the political system, has literally become such a disaster I don't know if it's possible to save it.

What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart.

No government under heaven could have prevented a people from ruin ... when they were exhausting their valuable resources in paying for superfluities, and running themselves in debt to foreigners, and to each other for articles of folly and dissipation.

When the fish price is too low, the fishermen starve.

The means of existence of our country will break down, once the floodgates are open to the foreigners.

Famine, it turns out, is not caused by a failure to produce food. It is caused by a failure to distribute food correctly — because the ruler is not accountable to the starving.

The sacrifices of our people were very great. Out of a population of one million, 28,000 were killed, 12,600 wounded, 10,000 were made political prisoners in Italy and Germany, and 35,000 made to do forced labor… all the communications, all the ports, mines and electric power installations were destroyed, our agriculture and livestock were plundered, and our entire national economy was wrecked.

We live on a planet of limited resources - an abstract notion for some of the world's population, but for many of the poorest and most vulnerable, those limits are all too real.

I come from a country in which I experienced economic collapse.

In my Nobel lecture, I suggested we had until the year 2000 to tame the population monster, and then food shortages would take us under. Now I believe we have a little longer.

If you want to know why the towers of American capitalism are crumbling, I recommend reading 'The Creature from Jekyll Island' by G. Edward Griffin.

The capitalist model, the developed model, the consumer model which comes from the North, which it has forced on the world, is falling apart on Earth, and there is no planet nearby that we can emigrate to.

The world is ending, make no mistake. It's coming to an end. This can't go on for much longer. Capitalism has to fall.

Famine is about so much more than food: it is about a famine of education, democracy, health, transport, and so many other items. The food famine becomes a symptom of that vast failure.

You just overwhelm the system with so many dependents and so many middle class benefits having to be paid that the money isn't there. It causes a system-wide collapse, capitalism implodes upon itself, and somebody comes into the breach and restructures the government as a socialist utopian paradise - and the guy's dead serious about it.

We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, affliction, or infamy. We kill when, because it is easier, we countenance, or pretend to approve of atrophied social, political, educational, and religious institutions, instead of resolutely combating them.