The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
Richard DawkinsTags: fear science purpose biology indifference suffering evolution design natural-selection disease starvation
She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)
Ron RashTags: words food loneliness starvation interraction speach
One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.
Marshall SahlinsTags: technology evolution culture anthropology hunger starvation hunters stone-age
Tipsy, they tumbled early into bed - to get as much sleep as they could. So they would feel less hunger. The summer catch had been poor; there wasn't much food. They ate with care and looked sideways at the old: the old were gluttons, everybody knew it, and what was the good of feeding them? It wouldn't harm them to starve a little.
The hungry dogs howled. The women rinsed the children's bellies with hot water three times a day, so they wouldn't cry so much for food. The old starved silently. ("The North")
Tags: poverty elderly hunger starvation poor oldl-starve
It has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else.
T.H. WhiteTags: war starvation nations weaponry geopolitics
North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as 'duck.' One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy—they wouldn't tell me the breed—but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn't seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there.
Christopher HitchensTags: cats dogs hotels starvation famine north-korea pyongyang north-korean-famine dog-meat korean-cuisine the-pyongyang-times
Feel what it's like to truly starve, and I guarantee that you'll forever think twice before wasting food.
Criss JamiTags: experience blessings food conscience guilt responsibility awareness hunger starvation famine guarantee wastefulness granted take-for-granted
I died last night. Seventy years too young.
Colin ThompsonTags: truth ignorance poverty starvation famine global dust niger early-death
Some of the things that beat the shit out of you . . . can beat the bullshit out of you too.
Henry V. O'NeilTags: endurance survival self-awareness perseverance starvation long-distance emergency hike
Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.
Randy AlcornTags: compassion power change indifference conscience hell guilt stewardship tolstoy hunger conviction starvation rationalization caring
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