Quotes

ON HUNGER AND HELPING PEOPLE IN NEED

Biblical

“For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in; I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me...I tell you whenever you do these things for the least important of these followers of mine, you did it for me.”      -- Matthew 25:35-40

"Give us each day our daily bread. " - Luke 11:2

"You give them something to eat." - Mark 6:37

"I want you to share your bread with the hungry, open your homes to the homeless poor, remove the yoke of injustice

and let the opressed go free."   - Isaiah 58

“He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and on them he has set the world.”- 1 Samuel 2:8-8

“Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land." - Deuteronomy 15:11-11

 “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill," and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” - James 2:14-17

 “If there is among you anyone in need ... do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be.” - Deuteronomy 15:7-8

 “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us - and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?” - 1 John 3:16-17

 

"Then Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty." - John 6:35

"Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of the destitute. Speak out, judge righteously, and defend the rights of the poor and needy."               - Proverbs 31:8-9

“A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes others

will himself be refreshed. “ 

 --Proverbs 11:25

“... let us love, not just in word or speech, but in truth and action.” I John 3:18

“Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:16

"Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain." -- 1 Corinthians 15:58

“But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only…”  -- James 1:22

Other 

“God calls the unqualified to do the unimaginable.”   -- Author unknown.

"We sometimes feel that what we do is just a drop in the

ocean, but the ocean would be less because of that missing

drop." -- Mother Teresa

"I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do." -- Helen Keller

“You can find Calcutta anywhere in the world. You only need two eyes to see. Everywhere in the world there are people that are not loved, people that are not wanted nor desired, people that no one will help, people that are pushed away or forgotten. And this is the greatest poverty. “  - Mother Teresa

“We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”

-- Mother Teresa

"There should be less talk. What do you do then? Take a broom and clean someone's house. That says enough." -- Mother Theresa

"He who does nothing for others does nothing for himself."

-- Goethe, author

"The purpose of life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.  Only then have we ourselves become true human beings." -- Albert Schweitzer

"Never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can change the world, indeed it's the only thing that has." -- Margaret Mead

"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation." -- Robert F. Kennedy

"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." -- Norman MacEwan

It is not enough to be compassionate; you must act.
-the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Cyatso, 1992

 

"Bread that this house may never know hunger, salt that life may 

always have flavor."
- Author Unknown
 

Hungry people cannot be good at learning or producing anything, except perhaps violence. - Pearl Bailey, entertainer

To a man with an empty stomach food is God. -- Gandhi

I can’t talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.

--George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbar

“The day hunger is eradicated from the earth, there will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world on the day of that great revolution.” 

- Federico Garcia Lorca, Spanish poet and dramatist (1889-1938)

– Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 25 (1948)

 

This is the first generation in all of recorded history that can do something about the scourge of poverty. We have the means to do it. We can banish hunger from the face of the earth.

-- Hubert H. Humphrey, 1965

There is no such thing as an acceptable level of unemployment, because hunger is not acceptable, poverty is not acceptable, poor health is not acceptable, and a ruined life is not acceptable.

-- Hubert H. Humphrey

Feeding the hungry is a greater work than raising the dead.

-- St. John Chrysostom

“Lord, to those who hunger, give bread. And to those who have bread, give the hunger for justice.” -- Latin American prayer

"Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don’t go hungry, unschooled or sick without care. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table." -- Bill Moyers

Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit. -- Eli Khamarov, Lives of the Cognoscenti

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. "

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, American general and 34th US President

The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence.

-- Samuel Johnson

Hunger is isolating; it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present.  --Elie Wiesel

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime. -- Aristotle

"To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships." -- W.E.B. Dubois

"A person who has food has many problems. A person who has no food has only one problem." --Chinese saying

"When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist." -- Dom Helder Camara

"The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing."

-- John Berger

"In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of. "

-- Confucius

"Clothes make the poor invisible. America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known." -- Michael Harrington

"When you are really poor, everything you see is something you can’t have."

-- Patrick Duncan

"Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor." -- James Baldwin

"If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in the world. Now the judgment of God is upon us and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools." --Inscription on the base of the statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
in front of the MLK chapel, Moorehouse College, Atlanta, GA

   

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. "  — Martin Luther King Jr.

 

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