“Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.”

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 7

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 30, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything…" by George Orwell?
George Orwell photo
George Orwell 473
English author and journalist 1903–1950

Related quotes

Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Tim Powers photo
Vitruvius photo
Henri Barbusse photo

“It terrifies one to think for how short a time science has been methodical and of useful industry; and after all, is there anything on earth more marvelously easy than destruction?”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi
Context: It terrifies one to think for how short a time science has been methodical and of useful industry; and after all, is there anything on earth more marvelously easy than destruction? Who knows the new mediums it has laid in store? Who knows the limit of cruelty to which the art of poisoning may go? Who knows if they will not subject and impress epidemic disease as they do the living armies — or that it will not emerge, meticulous, invincible, from the armies of the dead? Who knows by what dread means they will sink in oblivion this war, which only struck to the ground twenty thousand men a day, which has invented guns of only seventy-five miles' range, bombs of only one ton's weight, aeroplanes of only a hundred and fifty miles an hour, tanks, and submarines which cross the Atlantic? Their costs have not yet reached in any country the sum total of private fortunes.

“After all, vegetarianism is, more than anything else, the very essence and the very expression of altruistic sharing… the sharing of the One Life… the sharing of the natural resources of the Earth… the sharing of love, kindness, compassion, and beauty in this life.”

H. Jay Dinshah (1933–2000) American proponent of veganism and Jain ethics

The Vegetarian Way, Proceedings of the 24th World Vegetarian Conference (Madras, India, 1977), p. 34; as quoted in Richard H. Schwartz, Judaism and Vegetarianism (New York: Lantern Books, 2001), p. 75 https://archive.org/stream/JudaismAndVegetarianism#page/n99/mode/2up.

Jane Austen photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo
Frank Zappa photo

“There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we'd all love one another.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Zen Masters : The Wisdom of Frank Zappa (2003)

George Gilder photo

“From Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein to Richard Feynman and Charles Townes, the more men have gazed at light, the more it turns out to be a phenomenon utterly different from anything else.”

George Gilder (1939) technology writer

Telecosm : How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World (2000), p. 31
Context: Let there be light, says the Bible. All the firmaments of technology, all our computers and networks, are built with light, and of light, and for light, to hasten its spread around the world. Light glows on the telescom's periphery; it shines as its core; it illuminates its webs and its links. From Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein to Richard Feynman and Charles Townes, the more men have gazed at light, the more it turns out to be a phenomenon utterly different from anything else. And yet everything else — every atom and every molecula — is fraught with its oscillating intensity.

Related topics