Quotes & Sayings About Homelessness

In Palm Springs, they think homelessness is caused by bad divorce lawyers. — Garry Trudeau

My life was a wandering; I never had a homeland. It was a matter of being constantly tossed about, without rest; nowhere and never did I find a home. — Jan Amos Komensky

But Frances was beginning to feel that somewhere along the line, property, business, and all that contributes to the creation of wealth, must give back to government enough to guarantee adequate safeguarding of human welfare. The question would be, how to protect human beings against homelessness, starvation, and dependent old age without breaking down human initiative. She was seeing this as one fundamental problem of the government of the future; seeing too that somewhere leaders must arise who will be able to cope with this problem - honest leaders who will see the problem in its many-sidedness, and at last be able to solve it constructively. — May Martin Van Wye

Birth, copulation, death. You come out of one hole and you end up in another one. It's a pretty short trip. — Donald O'Donovan

This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet. — Salman Rushdie

Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it's a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master. — Sol Luckman

The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. 10 After the numbers were released, Milwaukee's chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief's views: "He believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future." What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department's own rules presented battered women with a devil's bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction. — Matthew Desmond

Narcissism is as profitable to a model as scruffiness is to a homeless person. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Homelessness came into being because liberal policy makers embraced a series of foolish ideas. — Mona Charen

The slick concrete reflected the facades of the work weary - grey, cracked and old,
but more importantly, trodden upon. — Martin Hopkins

I wasn't going to have enough money to pay for a Good Lifestyle, which meant I'd feel ashamed, which meant I'd get depressed, and that was the big one because I knew what that did to me: it made it so I wouldn't get out of bed, which led to the ultimate thing - homelessness. If you can't get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away. — Ned Vizzini

The homelessness of nature, its utter indifference to human existence, disclose to the infinite player that nature is the genius of the dramatic. — James P. Carse

By adopting a wonderful mutt, you'll save a life and help reduce animal homelessness while also boosting your chances of a more robust new furry friend, as mixed-breed dogs have demonstrated better health and longer life spans than their purebred cousins. — Ingrid Newkirk

Even in the depths of sleep, in which he had to satisfy his need for protection and love by curling himself up into a trembling ball, he could not rid himself of the feeling of loneliness and homelessness. — Bruno Schulz

I don't think anybody's had the confidence that we'd ever be able to make a dent in homelessness. We've just come to accept that we manage homelessness, that we try to make it less bad, but we never make it better. — John Carlos Frey

Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America. — Jack Kerouac

Housing is a human right. There can be no fairness or justice in a society in which some live in homelessness, or in the shadow of that risk, while others cannot even imagine it. — Jordan Flaherty

We used to talk and smile seven days ago when I was wearing a suit. Now I'm dressed in a beard and smell of dog shit I don't even get eye contact. I ask her how her week is going, and she looks to her friend behind the counter as if to say: I think this creep is hitting on me. Shall we call the police? — Craig Stone

Homelessness is the fundamental idea of salvation in Jainism. It means the breaking off of all earthly relations, and therefore, above all, indifference to general impressions and avoidance of all worldly motives, the ceasing to act, to hope, to desire. — Max Weber

Over the years I've worked with countless women who have inspired me with their stories. Beyond makeup, we've talked about life-altering events. Everything from the joy of being a new mom to dealing with homelessness and divorce. With each conversation, these women have shown that when you have the will and the heart, almost anything is possible - and that's what Pretty Powerful is all about. — Bobbi Brown

I want to avoid people, because there's only one thing worse than being homeless, and that's people who are not, knowing that you are. — Craig Stone

Meditation doesn't lead to enlightenment because in meditation the ego is trying to destroy the ego. — Donald O'Donovan

The image titled "The Homeless, Psalm 85:10," featured on the cover of ELEMENTAL, can evoke multiple levels of response. They may include the spiritual in the form of a studied meditation upon the multidimensional qualities of the painting itself; or an extended contemplation of the scripture in the title, which in the King James Bible reads as follows: "Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other." The painting can also inspire a physical response in the form of tears as it calls to mind its more earth-bound aspects; namely, the very serious plight of those who truly are homeless in this world, whether born into such a condition, or forced into it by poverty or war. — Aberjhani

The enemy never sleeps! — Donald O'Donovan

I was born under that star, the dung-beetle star. — Donald O'Donovan

Above all others I pity the homeless: where can they go to masturbate? — Robert Clark

The homeless dudes on Alameda all have legs any runway model would kill for, and sometimes I think of giving them money, but - I don't know, I've got bills to not pay, and drinks to make people buy for me. — Kris Kidd

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile. — C.D. Wright

There are five issues that make a fist of a hand that can knock America out cold. They're lack of jobs, obesity, diabetes, homelessness, and lack of good education. — Will.i.am

Kids have to be tough to survive on the streets of Kathmandu, where older gang members often beat and rob them. They face cold winters, hunger, homelessness, and unsympathetic police. But under each hardened shell there is still a child. — Craig Kielburger

As she looked me up and down, I felt like a daughter returning from summer camp to a mother who had worried unnecessarily. Except instead of summer camp it had been my entire adolescence, emancipation, homelessness, and single parenthood, and I couldn't rightly say that Elizabeth's worry had been unwarranted — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Street children are lovely blossoms just dropped from the tree after a heavy storm. Now they need to be put together with a needle and threads of security and shelter to live into a beautiful circle of life's garland — Munia Khan

Liberal child welfare experts decided that child abuse was not evidence of a moral or character flaw in the abusing parent. Instead, like poverty, crime, and homelessness, child abuse came to be viewed as evidence of a societal failure. — Mona Charen

It's not a homeless life for me,
It's just that I'm home less
Than others like to be. — Akilnathan Logeswaran

Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings. We're all tormented by that same destructive feeling, the sense that no one else on the planet cared about us — Paul Coelho

Compassion goes out looking for suffering, scouring the earth for poverty and misery and pain, the same way the cops look for criminals. — Donald O'Donovan

after the war, historian Marilyn Young warned: The U.S. can destroy Iraq's highways, but not build its own; create the conditions for epidemic in Iraq, but not offer health care to millions of Americans. It can excoriate Iraqi treatment of the Kurdish minority, but not deal with domestic race relations; create homelessness abroad but not solve it here; keep a half million troops drug free as part of a war, but refuse to fund the treatment of millions of drug addicts at home. . . . We shall lose the war after we have won it. — Howard Zinn

Aren't we all homeless without a home inside our mind? — Munia Khan

We are all refugees, and we have the scar to prove it. — Donald O'Donovan

These glaring disparities, about how those with the most access within the movement set the agenda, contribute to the skewed media portrait, and overwhelmingly fail at funneling resources to those most marginalized. My awakening pushed me to be more vocal about these issues, prompting uncomfortable but necessary conversations about the movement privileging middle- and upper-class cis gay and lesbian rights over the daily access issues plaguing low-income queer and trans youth and LGBT people of color, communities that carry interlocking identities that are not mutually exclusive, that make them all the more vulnerable to poverty, homelessness, unemployment, HIV/AIDs, hyper-criminalization, violence, and so much more. — Janet Mock

You came out kicking and screaming, reluctant as hell to leave, and you spent the rest of your life trying to get back in. — Donald O'Donovan

What would it hurt for me to give that homeless guy a couple bucks? Who the hell cares if he spends it on beer? Maybe beer is a step up for him from the harder stuff that knocked him onto the streets in the first place. Maybe, just maybe, he's actually going to spend it on food (homeless people do eat, right?). Maybe, he really is a desperate human being who is trying to change his situation. — Dan Pearce

Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours ... — Martin Hopkins

It was meant to be, two trolls living in a tree. — KayeC Jones

Our current contempt for poverty stems from information overload--this is the enabler---our over education as privileged people-- perhaps the real culprit--and our secret assurance that we ourselves owe no one anything beyond the exhausting daily round. We will defend our lack of idealism to anyone and be horrifyingly well received in this age. Indeed, many so called financial "philosophies" are in fact nothing more than elaborate justification for one petty selfishness after the next. — John Thomas Allen

We are homeless enough in this world under the best of circumstances without going to any special effort to test our capacity to be more so. — Harold Edmund Stearns

What I know about street outreach is that it is essential to dealing with the issue of youth homelessness. — Jewel

We saw people sleeping in homeless encampments in Napa Valley and Sonoma. Horrific ones in Watsonville. It's different because you're looking at homelessness and the lack of housing, less than something that's institutionalized. — Sanjay Rawal

I don't know. I got nothing. No house, no people, no place. Maybe that's troubles. Don't I say? — Alex La Guma

Nowhere do you see a real, integrated, full-blooded man or woman who shines like a beacon in this sea of disjointedness. — Donald O'Donovan

Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire, and thank God they were at home; and for the homeless starving wretch to lay him down and die. Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world. — Charles Dickens

Jesus experienced homelessness at Christmas so that we could experience a love we could never lose. — Timothy Keller

Home's where you go when you run out of homes. — John Le Carre

No one really belongs; at least not in this world. If there were a heaven, maybe there, but, even if there were, in it would be the souls who could bear witness to the undeniable cruelty of life, the poverty of the unwanted. — Kenneth Eade

One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a "significant precursor of suicide." The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. "Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection," they wrote, "a denial of one's most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience." Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared. — Matthew Desmond

Human being can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. it iz the worst of all tortures,the worst of all sufferings. — Paul Coelho

You call this progress, because you have motor cars and telephones and flying machines and a thousand potions to make you smell better? And people sleeping on the streets? — Howard Zinn

I will check the internet for at least an hour every morning scanning worldwide news to do with child abuse. So if you're constantly putting yourself in an environment where you're checking up on social economics or homelessness problems, if you keep yourself aware of it, you don't really have a day off. — Samantha Morton

The Key to overcoming the challenges in life is to make up your mind to overcome the Challenge — Carlton Young

Dave: 'Will you ever be happy Echo?'
Echo: 'I don't know I haven't tried it yet.'
Dave: 'Let's give it a shot together.'
Echo: 'Let's spread fire instead. — Jim Goldberg

Your lifelong rebellion against all forms of authority stems from the infant's desire to murder the father and possess the mother. — Donald O'Donovan

I find that our response to homelessness really puzzlingly. It's a peculiar response that people have. — Paul Bettany

Sometimes it's easy to walk by because we know we can't change someone's whole life in a single afternoon. But what we fail to realize it that simple kindness can go a long way toward encouraging someone who is stuck in a desolate place. — Mike Yankoski

Nothing is 'wrong' with me, Dan. What's wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily. — Martin Hopkins

The wistful term "transcendental homelessness" was coined by Georg Lukacs in
1916, in a little book called
The Theory of the Novel
. It refers to the longing of all souls
for the place in which they once belonged, and the "nostalgia ... for utopian perfection, a
nostalgia that feels itself and its desires to be the only true reality" (70). According to
Lukacs, everyone has a sense that he or she once belonged somewhere. However, this
place has been lost, and the purpose of human life is to once again find this place. The
search for this place of belonging, for the "home" that will once more fill life with
meaning, is the fundamental structure of the novel — Anonymous

I always try to tell a good story, one with a compelling plot that will keep the pages turning. That is my first and primary goal. Sometimes I can tackle an issue-homelessness, tobacco litigation, insurance fraud, the death penalty-and wrap a good story around it. — John Grisham

Sleep doesn't come easy when a broken twig conjures images of a hulking mental patient snapping the arms off children, over by the bin. — Craig Stone

I saw the bruises, the burns, the cuts - I knew which ones had been done to you by someone you thought you could trust. Someone you thought loved you. I knew which ones you gave yourself. — Abby Norman

If I want my life to matter, these eyes can't see who I really am.

Who I'm striving hard not to be.

The homeless girl hiding in front of them. — Brenda Rufener

Homelessness is an issue close to my heart. — Tyra Banks

I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business. — Sara Sheridan

During that very first conversation, about the araucaria, he called himself the Steppenwolf, and this too estranged and disturbed me a little. What an expression! However, custom did not only reconcile me to it, but soon I never thought of him by any other name; nor could I today hit on a better description of him. A wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd, a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness. — Hermann Hesse

Establishing publicly funded legal services for low-income families in housing court would be a cost-effective measure that would prevent homelessness, decrease evictions, and give poor families a fair shake. — Matthew Desmond

As Secretary of Housing, I do have to express alarm, signal the alarm if you will, that the potential for homelessness to grow is there. — Henry Cisneros

The beginning point at both conferences must be that everything is a woman's issue. That means racism in a woman's issue, just as is anti-Semitism, Palestinian homelessness, rural development, ecology, the persecution of lesbians, and the exploitative practices of global corporations. — Charlotte Bunch

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions
poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed
which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.
It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity. — Howard Zinn

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America
that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began. — Thomas Wolfe

Most families are destroyed from the inside, because they allow themselves to be conquered by others from the outside. — Carlton Young

As massive numbers of homeless, hungry, unemployed, drug-addicted, illiterate, and mentally ill people vanish behind its walls, the social problems of extreme poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, drug addiction, illiteracy, and mental illness become more ignorable, too. — Maya Schenwar

Pain is not insignificant. Neither is bewilderment or fear. Or conditions like poverty or homelessness. But somewhere - somewhere - there is peace. It is not even far off. It is somewhere deep inside us, in fact, ever present, just waiting for us to look inward to find it. She — Mary Balogh

When we bear witness, when we become the situation - homelessness, poverty, illness, violence, death - the right action arises by itself. We don't have to worry about what to do. We don't have to figure out solutions ahead of time. Peacemaking is the functioning of bearing witness. Once we listen with our entire body and mind, loving action arises. — Bernie Glassman

Even though homelessness reaches into the depths of despair, there's also a pride and beauty in it, as well. — Anthony Mackie

As a little kid, an unnamed fear would often overtake me. It wasn't a fear of anything tangible - tigers, burglars, homelessness - and it couldn't be solved by usual means like hugging my mother or turning on Nickelodeon shows. The feeling was cold and resided just below my stomach. It made everything around me seem unreal and unsafe. — Lena Dunham

Have you ever noticed that the only metaphor we have in our public discourse for solving problems is to declare war on it? We have the war on crime, the war on
cancer, the war on drugs. But did you ever notice that we have no war on homelessness? You know why? Because there's no money in that problem. No money to be made off of the homeless. If you can find a solution to homelessness where the corporations and politicians can make a few million dollars each, you will see the streets of America begin to clear up pretty damn quick! — George Carlin

We needed to take a discrete population to give people the confidence that if we can end veterans' homelessness , we can attack chronic homelessness, families and other populations like foster youth, who each have distinct needs. — John Carlos Frey

I show Dave the dummy for my book. He reads every bit of writing, looks at every picture, and asks no questions. When he's done, he wipes his hands on the book. — Jim Goldberg

First, liberals discover social and economic problems. Not a difficult task: the human race has always had such problems and will continue to, short of the Garden of Eden. Liberals, however, usually need scores of millions in foundation grants and taxpayer-financed commissions to come up with the startling revelations of disease, poverty, ignorance, homelessness, et al. Having identified "problems" to the accompaniment of much coordinated fanfare, the liberals proceed to invoke "solutions," to be supplied, of course, by the federal government, which we all know and love as the Great Problem-Solving Machine. — Anonymous

Blobfish, the guy who snapped a hamsters neck, myself, the homeless guy who has never thrown a punch (but has killed a fox) and Dickface, the man obsessed with trees and touching himself in public, follow an arrogant midget into the home of a pale creature I am certain will kill us all, to save the life of an ungrateful bastard parrot called Madness.
The temperature drops further.
A cold night for heroes. — Craig Stone

You need to stop making excuses for your mistakes, as long as you are complaining about what you did wrong you will never get started on doing it right — Carlton Young

Although AmeriCorps is making a difference among its participants and the people they serve, we must address homelessness and the need for job training among our veterans. — Cliff Stearns

Many people theorize poverty, but so many elements of poverty, individually, for most people who theorize about poverty would be really difficult to even comprehend the individual things. Just take homelessness. If you are homeless, what does it mean not to have a post box where people can contact you; what does it mean not knowing where you're going to sleep at the end of the day; what does it mean not having a place where you can store what little you might possess. So dealing with homelessness in itself is a huge thing for most people who are commentators [on] or benefactors to poverty. — Kumi Naidoo

Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES
modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn't be his life raft. — Nick Flynn

It is hard to determine what is most disturbing about this book - the devious and immoral tactics used by leaders and recruiters to get women to join the military, the terrible poverty and personal violence women were escaping that lead them to be vulnerable to such manipulation, the raping and harassing of women soldiers by their superiors and comrades once they got to Iraq, or the untreated homelessness, illnesses and madness that have haunted women since they came home. The Lonely Soldier is an important book, a crucial accounting of the shameful war on women who gave their bodies, lives and souls for their country. — Eve Ensler

Poor children, typhoons (the turbulent waters) washed their house collapsed, their homelessness, family members dead. Do not you want to help them? If you want to help them, please donate the money to typhoon Haiyan — Yanis Yingnan JI

In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

God has identified himself with the hungry, the sick, the naked, the homeless; hunger not only for bread, but for love, for care, to be somebody to someone; nakedness, not for clothing only, but nakedness of that compassion that very few people give to the unknown; homelessness, not only just for a shelter made from stone but for that homelessness that comes from having no one to call your own. — Mother Teresa

Let your love be the kindness to make a homeless person believe that a soul needs something more than just four walls and a ceiling. — Munia Khan

When we foster an economy without hope, we guarantee that a segment of our population will be destined to know homelessness on a permanent basis, and not for the one night I voluntarily spent at a shelter. — Jackie Speier

There is a difference between feeding someone and eating dinner with them. If every Christian at home just made room for the stranger we would end homelessness overnight. — Shane Claiborne

Mainly, I have actually been getting involved with an organization called MALDEF. It's a Latino organization. And I would like to get involved with charities that have to do with children or homelessness or education, or all of them together. — Edy Ganem