Silence is like starvation.

Life is a banquet. And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death.

There are many ways for people to die, but somehow dying of starvation is the most unacceptable of all. It happens in slow motion. Second by second, the distance between life and death becomes smaller and smaller, until the two are in such close proximity that one can hardly tell the difference.

To have no food for our heads no food for our hearts, no food for our activity, is that nothing? If we have no food for the body, how do we cry out, how all the world hears of it, how all the newspapers talk of it, with a paragraph headed in great capital letters, DEATH FROM STARVATION! But suppose one were to put a paragraph in the Times, Death of Thought from Starvation, or Death of Moral Activity from Starvation, how people would stare, how they would laugh and wonder! One would think we had no heads nor hearts, by the total indifference of the public towards them. Our bodies are the only things of any consequence.

Too many people are hungry not because there is dearth of food. It is because there is dearth of love and care in human hearts.

All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals,
true, but to die of hunger, starve to death—
that's the worst of all.

I must go over into the interior valleys. … There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them, with the Fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line, and yelling for a balanced budget. In one tent there were twenty people quarantined for small pox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I've tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can do something to knock these murderers on the heads. Do you know what they're afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities they will organize, and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporate farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without them. … The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering. … I'll do what I can. … Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies.

When a poor person dies of hunger it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed.

There is small danger of being starved in our land of plenty; but the danger of being stuffed is imminent, and yet hardly a thought is bestowed on the subject by those who direct the public sentiment.

It is a melancholy but an undoubted fact, that, even in the most thriving countries, part of the population annually dies of mere want. Not that all who perish from want absolutely die of hunger; though this calamity is of more frequent occurrence than is generally supposed.

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

When I joined the World Food Program a few years ago, the number of people that were marching toward the brink of starvation was about 80 million people. But over the past three years pre-COVID, it spiked up to 135 million. And you ask the question why? The primary reason was manmade conflict, compounded with climate extremes and fragile- fragile governments. But since COVID has come in and truly exacerbated every extenuating circumstances we had around the world, the numbers are going from 135 million from one year ago to 270 million people marching to the brink of starvation. This is not people going to bed hungry. This is people really struggling to get their next meal... if we don't address this...this is what we're looking at- we're looking at famines, destabilization and mass migration. And it's a lot cheaper to come in and prevent it and do it right. You know, if people in the United States are struggling for food, what [do] you imagine is happening in Niger, Burkina Faso or South Sudan?

If we don't talk about this epidemic we are going to die.

One-fifth of the world’s population, around 1,200 million people in the developing world, are living in official, absolute poverty...on less than $1 a day. They live miserable, stunted lives, deprived of all we take for granted. More than 30 million of them are actually dying of starvation in a world in which there is no shortage of food... We are so complacent that we do not even take it seriously. We think it is normal... Maitreya says: “How can you watch these people die before your eyes and call yourselves men?” p. 15