Quotes About Homelessness

Acceptable food rots while we are chased from bins behind restaurants, chased from sleeping on the street, chased from relieving ourselves unless we pay for food or gas, until finally we are so hungry, sleepless, smelly, constipated and beaten-down that we simply die of lack of will to live.

When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I might add - I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast.

I met a woman working 30 hours a week, trying to make ends meet, three children. And she slept the night before I met her in her car because she's homeless. We can do better. We can build a nation of shared prosperity.

I slept in closets and on floors for a long time.

Psychiatrists have long warned against giving money to the mentally ill homeless addicted to drugs, and yet that is what San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other progressive cities do. "It is not only clinically incorrect," said the director of psychiatric services at San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, "but almost sadistic to give money on a regular basis to people who have a demonstrated inability to handle cash funds.

He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them.

On my way over to Park Avenue to find a cab I pass an ugly, homeless bum-- a member of the genetic underclass-- and when he softly pleads for change, for anything, I noticed the Barnes & Noble book bag that sits next to him on the steps of the church he's begging on and I can't help but smirk, out loud, Oh right, like YOU read...

Back at our table Reeves is telling Hamlin about how he taunts the homeless in the streets, about how he hands a dollar to them as he approaches and then yanks it away and pockets it right when he passes the bums.

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

We have thousands and thousands of people living homeless on the streets of our cities at the same time that we have men and women earning millions of dollars a year running companies that make products whose continued usage will ruin our health, our environment, and our values. The irony is incredible. It's obscene.

I was homeless for almost a year and a half, just living in my car or bouncing around peoples' houses, going to 7-Eleven at the end of the day and asking them for the taquitos that they were going to throw out because I hadn't eaten in two days.

I think of those who are so much less fortunate than me all the time. I came out to people clapping and an outpour of support. And the reality is, for a lot of people, they get kicked out of their homes or are faced with violence.

The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.

Hundreds of our old neighbors, friends, coworkers, and teachers are new insomniacs. They file for dream bankruptcy, appeal for Slumber Corps aid, wait to be approved for a sleep donor. It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams. I believe our mayor is both genuinely concerned for his insomniac constituency, and also pandering to a powerfully desperate new voting block.

It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

The 140 children at the Cuando mission represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Angolan kids who have no one to look after them. Most wander aimlessly around the countryside or live by their wits on the streets of Luanda and other major cities, begging for money, washing or even just watching cars. In what should be one of Africa's richest countries, guarding vehicles has become a major form of employment.

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.

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?

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.

When it all got taken away, I was becoming a young man. So I had to sacrifice to leave my family... Sleeping in my car, getting an apartment for a month and getting evicted the next month. Staying in the $25, $50 hotels.

I'll always be known reaching out to young people who have no one to help them out, so I help them out with a place to stay or some food to eat or some change for their pocket.

I have a son, who is a... not an ordinary form of schizophrenia, but clearly, cannot take care of himself. And the great fear of then, of all parents is, when the parents die, who takes care of your child? And the answer is: they become homeless.

Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial.