Life & Wisdom Quote by Heinrich Heine

A poet’s jab at bureaucracy, Heine’s line strips public life down to a cruel mismatch: the clean certainty of numbers versus the messy urgency of bodies. “Statistics” isn’t just data here; it’s the whole managerial impulse to convert suffering into columns, graphs, and reports that can be filed, debated, and safely postponed. The verb “feed” does the heavy lifting. It’s physical, immediate, non-negotiable. You can argue statistics; you can’t argue an empty stomach.

Heine wrote in an era when Europe was being remade by industrialization, urban poverty, and the growing modern state. New tools of measurement and administration were arriving with a promise of rational progress. Heine, a German-Jewish poet living much of his life in exile in Paris, had little patience for systems that used “reason” as a mask for indifference. The line is a warning about how enlightenment can curdle into smugness: once you can quantify misery, you can also distance yourself from it.

The subtext isn’t anti-intellectualism. Heine isn’t saying facts don’t matter; he’s saying facts are morally inert until they’re attached to responsibility. Statistics can diagnose, justify budgets, and persuade skeptics. But they can also become a convenient substitute for action, a way to appear engaged while staying clean. The sentence lands because it’s so bluntly practical: you can’t eat an argument. In one stroke, Heine exposes a perennial political trick - confusing measurement for care, and documentation for justice.