The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — bread and circuses!

Bread! is that enough, idiots!

The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians, who had almost universally embraced the philosophy of Epicurus, enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquillity, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom.

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

I don't buy much anymore
I used to walk in circles
Around the curved edges of
Barstools
Searching
But its all seemed to dissolve
Into a more filling hunger
One that reaches
For the familiar black cotton dress
And the food that's been sitting in the pantry
Because I've stopped preparing for someday
Stopped wandering endless circles
Trying to fill my empty spaces
With things
~
But this is what happens when survival is a given
And status becomes our new obsession
We conflate our needs and wants
No wonder we are all so anxious
Imagine believing you need so much to get by.

Look, children, it's very simple. What's going to happen is this. If you people go forward, we eat bread. If you people retreat, we eat sticks. That is all there is to war. Let no one tell you different.

Food became secondary

freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence. They want freedom from “the fearful burden of free choice,”19 freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for the blemished product. They do not want freedom of conscience, but faith — blind, authoritarian faith. They sweep away the old order not to create a society of free and independent men, but to establish uniformity, individual anonymity and a new structure of perfect unity. It is not the wickedness of the old regime they rise against but its weakness; not its oppression, but its failure to hammer them together into one solid, mighty whole.

All sorrows are less with bread.

The gnawings of hunger conquers by degrees, till all that a man has he would give in exchange for a single crust of bread.

He who has two cakes of bread, let him dispose of one of them for some flowers of the narcissus; for bread is the food of the body, and the narcissus is the food of the soul.

His two only Meals in a Day, equivalent to our Collations, were for the most Part of Bread only...

There is a big confusion in this country over what we want verses what we need...you need food. You want a chocolate sundae.

Love for lineage nothing cares,
Tramples wisdom under foot,
Worth derides, and only looks
For money.