“Nobody has to go hungry today. There is plenty of work for a man who wants to work. A kid can make plenty of dough for himself doing almost anything. I was hungry. I had to fight my way along. Freights and the like, fight, fight all the time. The life was tough, but it hardened you.”

— Jack Dempsey

Jack speaking to The Ring Magazine (May 1956)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 4, 2024. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Nobody has to go hungry today. There is plenty of work for a man who wants to work. A kid can make plenty of dough for …" by Jack Dempsey?

Jack Dempsey 5

American boxer 1895–1983

Related quotes

“I don't mind a good fight. For reasons known only to God, I've had quite a few tough ones in my life. But I learned an important lesson along the way: In the end, it matters less that you can fight. What you fight for is the real test.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2000s, 2008, (2008)

“I came from an environment where I needed to succeed. There was no wealth or anything like that in the family. Not that we were paupers, but we had to fend for ourselves. Kids today are not as hungry as I was. They don’t understand how tough my generation was.”

Alan Sugar (1947) British business magnate, media personality, and political advisor

From an interview with Jan Moir, Daily Mail, 25th March 2009.

“Hungry fighters win fights.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“If there are females in your group, they will have plenty of hard and necessary work to do. Everyone will have to pull their own weight, but the hunting and fighting is almost always going to be up to the men. When lives are on the line, people will drop the etiquette of equality and make that decision again and again because it makes the most sense.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 9
The Way of Men (2012)

“I go anywhere in the world they tell me to go, any time they tell me to, to fight anybody they want me to fight. I move my family anywhere they tell me to move to, on a day's notice, and I live in whatever quarters they assign me. I work whenever they tell me to work… and I like it.”

Jim Webb (1946) American politician, military officer and author

As quoted in the October 2006 publication of Field Manual 6-22 (FM-22-100): Army Leadership by Headquarters, Department of the Army, p. 4-5

“For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defined simply as a place where there is plenty of food.”

Abraham Maslow book Motivation and Personality

Source: Motivation and Personality (1954), p. 17.
Context: For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defined simply as a place where there is plenty of food. He tends to think that, if only he is guaranteed food for the rest of his life, he will be perfectly happy and will never want anything more. Life itself tends to be defined in terms of eating. Freedom, love, community feeling, respect, philosophy, may all be waved aside as fripperies that are useless since they fail to fill the stomach. Such a man may fairly be said to live by bread alone. It cannot possibly be denied that such things are true, but their generality can be denied. Emergency conditions are, almost by definition, rare in the normally functioning peaceful society.

“There are plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined. Both qualities are necessary for the man who is to wage active battle against the powers that prey.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

"Practical Politics" in The Outlook (26 April 1913) http://books.google.com/books?id=ZD5YAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA936
1910s
Context: There are plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined. Both qualities are necessary for the man who is to wage active battle against the powers that prey. He must be clean of life, so that he can laugh when his public or his private record is searched; and yet being clean of life will not avail him if he is either foolish or timid. He must walk warily and fearlessly, and while he should never brawl if he can avoid it, he must be ready to hit hard if the need arises. Let him remember, by the way, that the unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.