Daniel Handler Quotes

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

I have never seen a picture of my mother. My mother's family never owned a photograph of her, which tells you everything you need to know about where I'm from and what the world was like for the people who gave me life.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

Hitler is living on the empty stomach of Germany …. Better political insight has a hard time winning as long as there is little prospect of filling the stomach.

Until the early 20th century, significant economic hardship was so woven into human history and experience that it wasn’t yet seen as an aberration. Only the combination of a severe crisis and the belief that such crises not only could but should be prevented by collective government action led to the creation of unemployment statistics.

The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.

Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.

The only things that were available to me were either be a laborer or be a drug dealer. So I became an armed robber. It was a lot simpler.

If you had a front row seat at the Renaissance, you would have seen Machiavelli come by plotting, and you would have seen murders in the streets, you would have seen violence, you have seen people burning books and it would have looked like the world was a horrible place, but that's where all these incredible stuff we're still living with comes out of.

I read a lot of archaeology and early history in a general way, not thinking particularly of this book, and this provided me with the background. It showed me how, possibly, the people lived back then.

I will do anything, including highway robbery and murder, to avoid leaving my children in poverty.

In far Eastern Russia, there's just some towns that time has forgotten. I guess they used to maybe be industrial or something that are now there's just lots of rusty hulks of buildings and a lot of people wandering around, a lot of alcoholism and violence because people have got nothing to do and no work. Yet people were very generous.

The lack of work destroys people.

In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.

I had a very good time when I did The Gleaners - even though the people are poor, and I was suffering to see the conditions, and plus they are not such lovely hearts. They are tough to each other, they beat each other, they are rude and they are violent and they drink. They're not sweethearts, you know, but some were so interesting.

To hold the reader's attention, you have to bring the person who's reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?

I got tired and embarrassed by the constant poverty of those years. I told Doug [ Brinkley] this is really going to be a horrible downer of a book [The Proud Highway] if all it's going to be is about being broke. I didn't like being reminded of desperation at all times.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.

Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.

Unless we cut the world population there is no way to avoid violence. People are hungry, people are starving, dying. When somebody is hungry he is going to steal. When somebody is dying, what does he care if he kills somebody else and gets money to survive? - because lust for life is the basis of all biological growth. A man can do anything to survive.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

The reason that the World Trade Center got hit is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don't have any hope for a better life.

There is so much poverty and desperation in South Sudan, and yet each side is militarily equipped.

A white man killed the mules and our cows that knocked us right back down. And things got so tough then I began to wish I was white.

History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.