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Half-starved
spiders prey'd on half-starved flies.
-- Charles Churchill
1731-1764, British Poet,
Satirist
When the
Somalians were merely another hungry third world people, we
sent them guns. Now that they are falling down dead from
starvation, we send them troops. Some may see in this a tidy
metaphor for the entire relationship between north and
south. But it would make a whole lot more sense
nutritionally -- as well as providing infinitely more vivid
viewing -- if the Somalians could be persuaded to eat the
troops.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich
1941-, American Author,
Columnist
There are
flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water
and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched
eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without
mirth. This is the death of the earth.
-- T. S. Eliot
1888-1965, American-born
British Poet, Critic
There was no
corn -- in the wide market-place all loathliest things, even
human flesh, was sold; They weighed it in small scales --
and many a face was fixed in eager horror then; his gold the
miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold through hunger,
bared her scorned charms in vain.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822, British Poet
I will venture
to affirm, that the three seasons wherein our corn has
miscarried did no more contribute to our present misery,
than one spoonful of water thrown upon a rat already drowned
would contribute to his death; and that the present
plentiful harvest, although it should be followed by a dozen
ensuing, would no more restore us, than it would the rat
aforesaid to put him near the fire, which might indeed warm
his fur-coat, but never bring him back to life.
-- Jonathan Swift
1667-1745, Anglo-Irish
Satirist
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