Yasser Arafat Quotes

I know exactly what it's like to not have a penny. I know exactly what it's like trying to get a job. I know exactly what it's like having bloody one tin of Ambrosia left in the cupboard. But I know I can survive.

It's frightening to think about more sanctions. When I've met North Koreans in China, they've said to me, 'You have no idea how difficult our lives are. We live like dogs.' They wake up in the morning wondering what they're going to eat for dinner.

In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad.

The miseries of the Indonesian people are sandwiched between two thick slabs of bread—one the bread of hope, the other the bread of patience

What can he do who lacks the necessary work, if he comes to be unemployed? He has nothing but to let himself die of hunger. Then a few phrases of pity will thrown on his cadaver.

The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern, yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, 'We are starving, how about a potato?' I speak from poignant memory.

It is useless to talk virtue to a starving girl.

Our chiefs are killed. . . . The little children are freezing to death. . . . My people have no blankets, no food. . . . My heart is sick and sad. . . . I will fight no more forever.

One-third of our people were dangerously ill, getting worse hourly, and we felt sure of meeting the same fate, with death as our only prospect, which in such a country was much worse yet.

Poverty was the greatest motivating factor in my life.

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?

I had seen people who had lost everything and everyone they loved to war, famine, and natural disasters.

Whole families used to starve in their cabins without their plight being discovered until the stench of their decaying corpses attracted notice.

Hunger can bring out the worst in us.

And one thing to be remembered: it is not that the people who are poor, starving, become frustrated with life - no. They cannot become frustrated. They have not lived yet - how can they be frustrated? They have hopes. A poor man always has hopes that something is going to happen - if not today then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow; if not in this life then in the next life.

There are children in Africa, starving to death, and you don't hear them whinging.

A hungry people listens not to reason, not cares for justice, nor is bent by any prayers.

I've always had a special place in my heart for old women digging through garbage bins. They saved my life so many times as a baby.

A guy I interviewed for Hard Times says, "What do I remember about the Great Depression? That I was hungry, that's all." Elemental things.

In the Great Depression in which I grew up and remember vividly, unemployment was over 25 percent, and over 35 percent where I lived. A grown man would work all day, 16 hours, for a dollar. I remember hundreds of people walking by, people who had come down from the North just to get warm. They would come to our house as beggars even though they might have a college education. People didn't have money. They bartered; they'd trade eggs or pigs. It was just completely different.

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.

Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate.

Tragedies come in the hungry hours.

Headlines pass; breadlines continue.

In really bad times, the hungriest would gather at his door at nightfall, vying for the chance to earn a few coins to feed their families by selling their bodies. Had I been older when my father died, I might have been among them. Instead I learned to hunt.