Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

I have said democracy and freedom do not work too well if you are hungry, if you are starving.

In the 19th century, some people looked at the condition of slavery and said that it was monstrous and unconscionable; that it must be abolished. ... Today the condition of hunger in a world of plenty is equally monstrous and unconscionable and it too must be abolished. We must become the 'new abolitionists'.

The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men.

In 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. It changed my life. I came back home, told my mother, 'I'd like to live and work in a village.' Mother went into a coma.

I believe that one of the saddest things in the world today is that some people don't have enough food to nourish themselves. It's the 21st century and that's really not acceptable, so if I could do something that would change that I would be really happy.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, 'What are we going to do?' but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that's nothing.

There is plenty of corn in Castile, but he who has none, starves.

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.

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.

It is a melancholy but an undoubted fact, that, even in the most thriving countries, part of the population annually dies of mere want.

Why be shocked at the drowning of a few if there is no objection to starving a nation?

What is poverty, if not violence. Like, the number of people who die every year from starvation and from hunger and poverty is in the tens of millions.

When a poor person dies of hunger it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed.

There are people who go to bed hungry, and that is unconscionable.

I regard philanthropy as a tragic apology for wrong conditions under which human beings live.

Oh Lord, are there really people starving still?

What is disgraceful and outrageous is that 18,000 children die of hunger every day, every one of them a preventable death. That's what the controversy should be about.

The work of Nigeria is not complete for as long as there is any one Nigerian who goes to bed on empty stomach.

I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation.

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

The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.

A hungry man is not a free man.

A little goes a long way in Somalia: $5 will feed a person there for about two weeks.

Close to a billion people - one-eighth of the world's population - still live in hunger. Each year 2 million children die through malnutrition. This is happening at a time when doctors in Britain are warning of the spread of obesity. We are eating too much while others starve.