Quotes About Famine

Yet, like more recent mega-corporations, the EIC proved at once hugely powerful and oddly vulnerable to economic uncertainty. Only seven years after the granting of the Diwani, when the Company's share price had doubled overnight after it acquired the wealth of the treasury of Bengal, the East India bubble burst after plunder and famine in Bengal led to massive shortfalls in expected land revenues.

We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru! They were at least butchers on a religious principle, however diabolical their zeal. We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped – say what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the servants of the East India Company?

Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked. God sometimes sends a famine, sometimes a pestilence, and sometimes a hero, for the chastisement of mankind; none of them surely for our admiration.

God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

You cannot preach self-government and liberty to people in a starving land.

No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.

Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.

If the empire had been afflicted by any recent calamity, by a plague, a famine, or an unsuccessful war; if the Tiber had, or if the Nile had not, risen beyond its banks; if the earth had shaken, or if the temperate order of the seasons had been interrupted, the superstitious Pagans were convinced that the crimes and the impiety of the Christians, who were spared by the excessive lenity of the government, had at length provoked the divine justice.

This attempt at famine relief. We should do nothing to help. Let the peasants starve. The worse things are, the more the tsarist government is weakened." It was said quite calmly, without any anger or malice, in a detached, matter-of-fact voice.

Governments of rich countries spend some $6bn of tax money a year on disaster relief and development aid overseas, while each new earthquake, famine or tidal wave can attract 1,000 aid organisations, from the United Nations Children's Fund and Oxfam to the 'Jesus Brigades' of the American south and other charitable adventurers.

Sweden endured a potato famine like in Ireland and loads of people emigrated to the US.

Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.

The cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, and most of the great Gothic churches that are still the most beautiful buildings in the cities of Europe, were erected in the Middle Ages, a time marked by violence, famine, and plague. The construction of a cathedral was a huge enterprise lasting decades.

He hath eaten me out of house and home.

But there is one fact which does emerge from human history with unvarying insistence, and it is a fact which is fatal to the Malthus-Darwin theory: that the natural rate of human increase is repressed the more, not where the misery due to famine, war, and pestilence falls more heavily, but precisely where it falls more lightly.

Starvation and disease are the original weapons of mass destruction. When you burn fields and kill animals, people are left vulnerable.

My great, great grandfather, Michael O'Hanson, fled the impending potato famine of Ireland and arrived in America in the early 1840s with his bride, Bridget. They headed for Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love and a mecca for Irish-Catholic immigrants then.

Progress to reduce hunger is being made by tackling both the cause and the consequences of extreme poverty and famine.

While no famine has ever taken place in a democracy, they're the rule rather than the exception in socialist countries.

I imagined a dark world where the stars clamor to be inside us. Whatever we invent becomes the history we have to live. In truth, it takes only a handful of history's shadows to commandeer our dreams It takes a famine of the heart to empty the streets of our words. It takes an imaginary terror to rid ourselves of imagination.

I imagined a dark world where the stars clamor to be inside us. Whatever we invent becomes the history we have to live. In truth, it takes only a handful of history's shadows to commandeer our dreams It takes a famine of the heart to empty the streets of our words. It takes an imaginary terror to rid ourselves of imagination. from "Involuntary Beginnings

Stories like Yu's shocked Yang. 'I did not foresee this level of cruelty,' he said. 'There was cannibalism in ancient times in famines. People used to talk about "exchanging children to eat", because they could not bear to eat their own children. But this was much worse.' Even the final nationwide death toll, a figure which has been known in the west for more than two decades, was a revelation.

Mubei: Zhongguo Liushi Niandai Da Jihuang Jishi [Tombstone: A Record of the Great Chinese Famine of the 60s], Cosmos Books, Hong Kong, 2008.

I couldn't remember the cats' names any better than the dogs'. Four of them were named after the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and all I could really recall was that Famine ironically weighed about thirty pounds.