Quotes about eating
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Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Robert Anton Wilson photo
Anthony Bourdain photo
Michael Crichton photo
Antonin Artaud photo
Barack Obama photo

“Why can't I just eat my waffle?”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
Ronald Reagan photo
Ronald Reagan photo

“You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)
Christopher Morley photo

“No man is lonely while eating spaghetti:
it requires so much attention.”

Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet
Susan B. Anthony photo
Winston S. Churchill photo

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat him last.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

In Reader's Digest (December 1954).
Post-war years (1945–1955)
Variant: An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

Terry Pratchett photo
Allen Ginsberg photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Harper Lee photo

“Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.”

Pt. 1, ch. 10
Atticus Finch & Maudie Atkinson
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Context: "I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.
“Your father's right," she said. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

Cassandra Clare photo
Mark Twain photo
Gary L. Francione photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Saul Bellow photo
Christopher Paolini photo
Scott Adams photo
William Shakespeare photo
William C. Roberts photo
Peter Ustinov photo

“Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus.”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

As quoted in Contemporary Quotations (1988) by James Beasley Simpson

Barack Obama photo
Ramana Maharshi photo
Paul Watson photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo

“Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

http://books.google.com/books?id=lFXyZLM1XxYC&pg=PT412&dq=%22Just+as+eating+against+one%E2%80%99s+will+is+injurious+to+health%22&hl=en&ei=GFRbTIjiGoL-8AbytdC4Ag&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Just%20as%20eating%20against%20one%E2%80%99s%20will%20is%20injurious%20to%20health%22&f=false
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Dick Gregory photo
Mark Twain photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Gabriel Iglesias photo

“The first time I came here, I got the chance to meet some people, and they said, "You know what, Gabriel, have you ever been here, have you ever been to Chicago?" I'm like, "No, it's my first time." They said, "Well, you know, we'd like to take you out eat if you're down." And I'm like, "Well, hello!" [Audience laughs] "I'm very down!" They took me to a restaurant called Portillo's." [Audience cheers] You've heard of it? So, we get there, and it was, it was very, very good. The hot dogs were delicious, I had a chicken chopped salad, it was amazing. I had a beef dip, really really good. But it wasn't until the meal was almost over that these new friends of mine said, "We'd like for you to try something you've might not have ever had before." And I'm like, "That's not likely." I said, "So, what is it you want me to try?" And they said, "Well, they sell a thing here at Portillo's called a Chocolate Cake Shake." [Audience cheers] I said, "You had me at 'Chocolate'." They said, "Well, you gotta go to the special window and you gotta order it from the lady." I go, "Okay, cool." So, I get up and walk to the lady, and she's like, "Can I help you?" I said, "Yes, my friends are telling me that I need to try this thing, called a 'Chocolate Cake Shake'." "Okay, what size would you like?" "How good is it?" "You'll want a large." [Audience laughs] "Alright, can I please have a large Chocolate Cake Shake?" "No problem." [Imitates her entering the order in on the cash register] And I pay, and she turns around and walks over to this little refrigerator that's on the counter, and she opens it up, and she pulls out a piece of chocolate cake. And I'm thinking to myself, "She must have misunderstood what I said. I didn't ask for a piece of chocolate cake, I asked for a Chocolate Cake Shake." She must've heard what I was thinking, because she's walking by and she's like, "It's gonna happen." She walks over to the blender, she takes the freaking lid off, she just looks at me and does this. [Mimes the cashier turning her hand over, dropping the chocolate cake in the blender] And I was like, "NO!" And she's like, "Oh, yeah." [Mimes the lady pushing the button and the blender blending the cake] And she pours it, and she hands me this, like, 44-ounce chocolate shake, which is WAY more than anybody should be drinking. The straw was so thick, you could almost put your thumb in it, okay? So, I grab this shake, and I begin to attempt to drink it. So, I'm [Mimics him trying to suck the shake through the straw, making heavy "MMM" sounds], and I can see the shake coming up. [Still makes the "MMM" sounds, while using his finger to show how show the shake's coming up the straw] And it hit, and then, all of a sudden, [Mimics his nipples getting hard] "WOOOOO!"”

Gabriel Iglesias (1976) American actor

I'm Sorry For What I Said When I Was Hungry (2016)

Fiona Apple photo
James Cameron photo
Anne Frank photo
William C. Roberts photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo
Benjamin Disraeli photo
Jordan Peterson photo

“One of the things you want to do with a conception like compassion is that you want to start thinking about it like a psychologist, or like a scientist, because compassion is actually definable. The easiest way to approach it is to think about it in Big-5 terms, because it maps onto Agreeableness, which you can break down into Compassion and Politeness. The liberal types, especially the Social Justice types, are way higher in Compassion. It's actually their fundamental characteristic. You might think, 'well, compassion is a virtue.' Yes, it's a virtue, but any uni-dimensional virtue immediately becomes a vice, because real virtue is the intermingling of a number of virtues and their integration into a functional identity that can be expressed socially. Compassion can be great if you happen to be the entity towards which it is directed. But compassion tends to divide the world into crying children and predatory snakes. So if you're a crying child, hey great. But if you happen to be identified as one of the predatory snakes, you better look the hell out. Compassion is what the mother grizzly bear feels for her cubs while she eats you because you got in the way. We don't want to be thinking for a second that compassion isn't a virtue that can lead to violence, because it certainly can. The other problem with compassion - this is why we have conscientiousness - there's five canonical personality dimensions. Agreeableness is good if you are functioning in a kin system. You want to distribute resources equally for example among your children, because you want all of them to have the same chance, and even roughly the same outcome. That is, a good one. But the problem is that you can't extend that moral network to larger groups. As far as I can tell, you need conscientiousness, which is a much colder virtue. It's also a virtue that is much more concerned with larger structures over the longer period of time. And you can think about conscientiousness as a form of compassion too. It's like: 'straighten the hell out, and work hard and your life will go well. I don't care how you feel about that right now.' Someone who's cold, that is, low in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness, will tell you every time. 'Don't come whining to me. I don't care about your hurt feelings. Do your goddamn job or you're going to be out on the street.' One might think, 'Oh that person is being really hard on me.' Not necessarily. They might have your long term best interest in mind. You're fortunate if you come across someone who is disagreeable. Not tyrannically disagreeable, but moderately disagreeable and high in conscientiousness because they will whip you into shape. And that's really helpful. You'll admire people like that. You won't be able to help it. You'll feel like, 'Oh wow, this person has actually given me good information, even though you will feel like a slug after they have taken you apart.' That's the compassion issue. You can't just transform that into a political stance. I think part of what we're seeing is actually the rise of a form of female totalitarianism, because we have no idea what totalitarianism would be like if women ran it, because that's never happened before in the history of the planet. And so, we've introduced women into the political sphere radically over the past fifty years. We have no idea what the consequence of that is going to be. But we do know from our research, which is preliminary, that agreeableness really predicts political correctness, but female gender predicts over and above the personality trait, and that's something we found very rarely in our research. Usually the sex differences are wiped out by the personality differences, but not in this particular case. On top of that, women are getting married later, and they're having children much later, and they're having fewer of them, and so you also have to wonder what their feminine orientation is doing with itself in the interim, roughly speaking. A lot of it is being expressed as political opinion. Fair enough. That's fine. But it's not fine when it starts to shut down discussion.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Sarada Devi photo
Alex Jones photo
Chrissie Hynde photo
Harvey Milk photo
Luigi Cornaro photo
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach photo

“We are able to breathe, drink, and eat in comfort because millions of organisms and hundreds of processes are operating to maintain a liveable environment, but we tend to take nature's services for granted because we don't pay money for most of them.”

Eugene P. Odum (1913–2002) mathematician, ecologist, natural philosopher, and systems ecologist

Eugene Odum (1975) A Bridge Between Science and Society as cited in: Edward Goldsmith (2002) " Ecology – a bridge http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/737/"

Yoshida Shoin photo
John Wayne photo
Shania Twain photo
Kurt Cobain photo

“Yes I eat cow I am not proud.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

Mr Moustache.
Song lyrics, Bleach (1989)

Charles Perrault photo

“Haven't you heard that this house belongs to an ogre who eats little children?”

Charles Perrault (1628–1703) French author

Tales of Mother Goose, 1727, "Little Thumb"

Logan Pearsall Smith photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Greek tragedy met her death in a different way from all the older sister arts: she died tragically by her own hand, after irresolvable conflicts, while the others died happy and peaceful at an advanced age. If a painless death, leaving behind beautiful progeny, is the sign of a happy natural state, then the endings of the other arts show us the example of just such a happy natural state: they sink slowly, and with their dying eyes they behold their fairer offspring, who lift up their heads in bold impatience. The death of Greek tragedy, on the other hand, left a great void whose effects were felt profoundly, far and wide; as once Greek sailors in Tiberius' time heard the distressing cry 'the god Pan is dead' issuing from a lonely island, now, throughout the Hellenic world, this cry resounded like an agonized lament: 'Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!”

Mit dem Tode der griechischen Tragödie dagegen entstand eine ungeheure, überall tief empfundene Leere; wie einmal griechische Schiffer zu Zeiten des Tiberius an einem einsamen Eiland den erschütternden Schrei hörten "der grosse Pan ist todt": so klang es jetzt wie ein schmerzlicher Klageton durch die hellenische Welt: "die Tragödie ist todt! Die Poesie selbst ist mit ihr verloren gegangen! Fort, fort mit euch verkümmerten, abgemagerten Epigonen! Fort in den Hades, damit ihr euch dort an den Brosamen der vormaligen Meister einmal satt essen könnt!"
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 54

Matthew Arnold photo
Chrissie Hynde photo
George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle photo

“Little General Monck
Sat upon a trunk,
Eating a crust of bread;
There fell a hot coal
And burnt in his clothes a hole,
Now little General Monck is dead.”

George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle (1608–1670) English soldier and politician

Nursery rhyme; The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (2nd ed. 1997), pp365-6
About

Mark Twain photo

“Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Letter to Gertrude Natkin, 2 March 1906 http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/53b4cf90-7739-0132-f12c-58d385a7b928

José Saramago photo

“Don’t quibble with the king over pears, let him eat the ripe ones and give you the green ones.”

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 78 (Vintage 2003)

Ken Ham photo
Tom Regan photo
Karl Marx photo

“And his money he cannot eat.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Vol. I, Ch. 7, pg. 213.
(Buch I) (1867)

Jordan Peterson photo
Jean Jacques Rousseau photo

“I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake."”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

This passage contains a statement Qu'ils mangent de la brioche that has usually come to be attributed to Marie Antoinette; this was written in 1766, when Marie Antoinette was 10 and still 4 years away from her marriage to Louis XVI of France, and is an account of events of 1740, before she was born. It also implies the phrase had been long known before that time.
Variant: At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, "Then let them eat cake!"
Source: Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782), Books II-VI, VI

Henry Mintzberg photo
Frank Zappa photo

“Watch out where the huskies go,
and don't you eat that yellow snow.”

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

"Don't Eat The Yellow Snow".
Apostrophe (') (1974)

Thomas Mann photo
Pope Francis photo
Little Richard photo

“There's something I prefer not saying, I will say this. I'm a believer in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I believe the seventh-day Sabbath is God's way. I believe we should eat kosher. I was invited to a party night before last. Rod Stewart's. I didn't go, because I open the Sabbath on Friday.”

Little Richard (1932) American pianist, singer and songwriter

When John Waters asked him, Are you Jewish now? http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/nov/28/john-waters-met-little-richard.
Song lyrics, Others

Slavoj Žižek photo
Eva Mendes photo
Pliny the Elder photo
Rose Scott photo

“We will one day think it as horrible to eat animals as we now think it horrible to eat each other.”

Rose Scott (1847–1925) Australian suffragist

Miscellaneous Notes, Scott Papers; as quoted in A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic by Bruce Scates (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 247 https://books.google.it/books?id=zkgeEmlRjEgC&pg=PA247.

Glenn Beck photo
Billy Graham (wrestler) photo

“I lift barbell plates. I eat T-bone steaks. I'm sweeter than a German chocolate cake. How much more of me can you take?”

Billy Graham (wrestler) (1943–2023) American professional wrestler, american football player, bodybuilder

Billy Graham, Tangled Ropes: Superstar Billy Graham (2006)

Christopher Paolini photo
Martha C. Nussbaum photo

“When I arrived at Harvard in 1969, my fellow first-year graduate students and I were taken up to the roof of the Widener Library by a well-known professor of classics. He told us how many Episcopal churches could be seen from that vantage point. As a Jew (in fact a convert from Episcopalian Christianity), I knew that my husband and I would have been forbidden to marry in Harvard's church, which had just refused to accept a Jewish wedding. As a woman I could not eat in the main dining room of the faculty club, even as a member's guest. Only a few years before, a woman would not have been able to use the undergraduate library. In 1972 I became the first female to hold the Junior Fellowship that relieved certain graduate students from teaching so that they could get on with their research. At that time I received a letter of congratulation from a prestigious classicist saying that it would be difficult to know what to call a female fellow, since "fellowess" was an awkward term. Perhaps the Greek language could solve the problem: since the masculine for "fellow" in Greek was hetairos, I could be called a hetaira. Hetaira, however, as I knew, is the ancient Greek word not for “fellowess” but for “courtesan.””

Martha C. Nussbaum (1947) American philosopher

[Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, https://books.google.com/books?id=V7QrAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA6, 1 October 1998, Harvard University Press, 978-0-674-73546-0, 6–7]

Justin Bieber photo

“I try to read all of my fan mail. A lot of them send me candy, which I'm not allowed to eat 'cause my mom says it might be poisonous.”

Justin Bieber (1994) Canadian singer-songwriter, record producer, and actor

Interview with TIME, as quoted by SugarScape http://www.sugarscape.com/main-topics/lads/506576/justin-biebers-mum-thinks-fans-are-trying-poison-him, May 2010

Abraham Lincoln photo
Barack Obama photo

“So we pulled up to this diner, where people told us that we could get some good pie. And I like pie. Do you like pie too? So, we go in there, and we say, "Oh, what kind of pie you got?' And they didn't have sweet potato pie, they didn't have pumpkin pie. They had some cream pies mostly, which is OK with me. So, I got some coconut cream pie. And Governor Strickland, he got lemon meringue pie.
So while we're waiting for our pie, the staff come and they want to take a picture with me because they say, you know, the owner of this dinner is a staunch die-hard Republican, so we want to kind of tease him a little bit by getting this picture with you. So we're taking this picture and suddenly the owner comes out with the pie. And he looks at me and I say, "Sir, I understand that you are a die-hard Republican." He says, "That's right." I said, "How's business?" He said, "Not so good." He said, "My customer, they can't afford to eat out anymore." I said, "Who's been in charge of the economy for the last eight years?" He said, "Republicans." I said, "You know, if you kept on hitting your head against a wall over and over again and it started to hurt, at some point would you stop hitting your head against the wall?"”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

He said, "You've got a point."
At a rally in Londonberry, New Hampshire (16 October 2008) http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0810/16/cnr.04.html
2008

George Foreman photo

“I want to keep fighting because it is the only thing that keeps me out of the hamburger joints. If I don't fight, I'll eat this planet.”

George Foreman (1949) a retired American professional boxer, ordained Baptist minister, author and entrepreneur

Foreman's a hungry man http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1053352,00.html

Napoleon I of France photo
H. Beam Piper photo
Jesse Owens photo

“People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals. There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway.”

Jesse Owens (1913–1980) American track and field athlete

Interview (1971); also quoted in "Owens pierced a myth" by Larry Schwartz http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00016393.html in ESPN SportsCentury
1970s

Theodore Roosevelt photo
Frank Zappa photo
Oscar Wilde photo
Sarvajna photo
John Lennon photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo
Jamie Oliver photo
John Cassian photo
James Baldwin photo
Robert Smith (musician) photo

“If Morrissey says not to eat meat, then I’m going to eat meat; that’s how much I hate Morrissey.”

Robert Smith (musician) (1959) English singer, songwriter and musician

Q, May 1989