The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.
Oscar WildeRead
One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Despite advancements in culture and technology, hunger remains a pervasive issue.
Marshall Sahlins highlights the paradox of modern society where, despite significant technological progress and cultural evolution, hunger and starvation persist as institutional problems. He suggests that as humanity has developed, the prevalence of hunger has not diminished, indicating a deeper issue within the structure of our civilization that allows such disparities to exist.
Themes
HungerStarvationCultureSocietyTechnology
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about global food security, this quote could emphasize the ongoing hunger crisis despite technological advancements.
Similar quotes
Today it is infinitely easier to kill one million people than to control one million people.
Zbigniew BrzezinskiRead
RICH, adj. Holding in trust and subject to an accounting the property of the indolent, the incompetent, the unthrifty, the envious and the luckless.
Ambrose BierceRead
God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world.
Philip YanceyRead
Our behavior toward each other is the strangest, most unpredictable, and most unaccountable of all the phenomena with which we are obliged to live. In all of nature, there is nothing so threatening to humanity as humanity itself.
Lewis ThomasRead
By deafening ourselves to the emotional consequences of violence we have become confused by its relationship to sex. We have come to believe that violence equals aggression, and we have come to base our model of sexuality on our model of violence... converting an act of aggression into an act of consensual sexuality.
Derrick JensenRead