Exploitation, alienation, poverty, disempowerment, fragmenting and debilitating labor, production for the profit of a few -- much less harsh homelessness, starvation, and degradation -- are not like gravity. They arise from institutional relations established by human beings. New institutions, also established by human beings, can generate other vastly superior outcomes. Defining and working to attain those new institutions ought to be our economic agenda.
-- Michael Albert

* “In today's climate in our country, which is sickened with the pollution of pollution, threatened with the prominence of AIDS, riddled with burgeoning racism, rife with growing huddles of the homeless, we need art and we need art in all forms. We need all methods of art to be present, everywhere present, and all the time present.” -- Maya Angelou

“Shelter Network’s programs and services are a rainbow in the clouds for homeless children and adults.”
-- Maya Angelou

Clearly, there are a thousand and one scenarios for how someone can slip through the cracks. I'll walk down the street and see a homeless person, and I'll want to stop them and say, How did this happen? Where's your mother? Are you physically ill? Mentally ill? -- William Baldwin "A strong economy causes an increase in the demand for housing; the increased demand for housing drives real-estate prices and rentals through the roof. And then affordable housing becomes completely inaccessible." -- William Baldwin

 

You can spend the money on new housing for poor people and the homeless, or you can spend it on a football stadium or a golf course.
-- Jello Biafra

“Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.”
-- Christian Nevell Bovee

The average family earning minimum wage spends 141 percent of their income struggling to meet basic needs - food, shelter, clothing.
-- Sherrod Brown

* Peace is no mere matter of men fighting or not fighting. Peace, to have meaning for many who have known only suffering in both peace and war, must be translated into bread or rice, shelter, health, and education, as well as freedom and human dignity - a steadily better life. If peace is to be secure, long-suffering and long-starved, forgotten peoples of the world, the underprivileged and the undernourished, must begin to realize without delay the promise of a new day and a new life. -- Ralph J. Bunche

“There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfillment. The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase 'to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy'. The need to live is our physical need for such things as food, clothing, shelter, economical well-being, health. The need to love is our social need to relate to other people, to belong, to love and to be loved. The need to learn is our mental need to develop and to grow. And the need to leave a legacy is our spiritual need to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence, and contribution”
-- Stephen R. Covey

“If one's life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital: satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect yourself from the elements. And finally, there is an intense delight in abandoning faulty states of mind and in cultivating helpful ones in meditation.” - The Dalai Lama

* "What we would like to do is change the world-make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended for them to do. -- Dorothy Day The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner. But we are destroying crops, setting fire to entire villages and to the people in them. We are not performing the works of mercy but the works of war. -- Dorothy Day

"What we would like to do is change the world-make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended for them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute…we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend."
-- Dorothy Day

* “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?” -- Mohandas Gandhi

* "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

* “They are safe but they are not in their homes. They are city-less. I think it's just a disaster for everyone." -- Teri Hatcher

* I mean, I don't think I'm alone when I look at the homeless person or the bum or the psychotic or the drunk or the drug addict or the criminal and see their baby pictures in my mind's eye. You don't think they were cute like every other baby? -- Dustin Hoffman

"It is in the shelter of each other that the people live."
-- Irish proverb

"This is my chosen fast: to loosen all the bonds that bind humans unfairly, to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke. Share your bread with the hungry, take the homeless into your homes, clothe the naked when you see him/her, do not turn away from people in need. Then cleansing life shall break forth like the dawn, and your wounds shall soon be healed. Your triumph shall go before you and your Lord’s glory shall be your rearguard. Then you shall call and the Lord will answer. "
-- Isaiah 57

* “If Americans ever allow banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless” ~ Thomas Jefferson

* We must all work together to end youth homelessness in America -- Jewel Support for shelters and transitional living and housing programs is necessary if we are going to change the landscape for homeless boys and girls in America. -- Jewel What I know about street outreach is that it is essential to dealing with the issue of youth homelessness. -- Jewel

Most homeless kids are on the streets because they have been forced by circumstances that cause them to think that they are safer there than in any home they once knew.
-- Jewel

Life in a shelter or on the streets puts homeless kids and youth at a higher risk for physical and sexual assault and abuse, physical illness, including HIV/AIDS
-- Jewel

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”
-- Philip Johnson

They have stolen the public lands. They have grasped all to themselves, and by their unprincipled greed brought a crisis of unparalleled distress on forty millions of people, who have natural resources to feed, clothe and shelter the whole human race.
-- Denis Kearney

* We have weapons of mass destruction we have to address here at home. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Unemployment is a weapon of mass destruction. -- Dennis Kucinich

 

We have come dangerously close to accepting the homeless situation as a problem that we just can't solve.
-- Linda Lingle

Public housing is more than just a place to live, public housing programs should provide opportunities to residents and their families."
-- Carolyn McCarthy

“People who are homeless are not social inadequates. They are people without homes.”
-- Sheila McKechnie

Seven out of 10 Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless.
-- Pras Michel

Our aim is to convince the world's leaders that our cities, towns and villages need to be healthy, safe, just and sustainable.
-- Wally N'Dow

'My home is a place of warmth and love. No one should be denied a home.'
-- Gail Porter

"Don't try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable."
-- Daniel Quinn

'Home is a sanctuary for me and the place where I can relax. Everyone should have the right to a safe and secure home.'
-- Corinne Bailey Rae

* If you walk down the street and see someone in a box, you have a choice. That person is either the other and you're fearful of them, or that person is an extension of your family. -- Susan Sarandon If you walk down the street and see someone in a box, you have a choice. That person is either the other and you're fearful of them, or that person is an extension of your family. And that makes you at home in that world and not fearful. So really it's very self-serving. -- Susan Sarandon

* Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty, which robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger; or to achieve sufficient nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses or the opportunity to be adequatley clothed or sheltered, or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities. -- Amartya Sen

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty, which robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger; or to achieve sufficient nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses or the opportunity to be adequatley clothed or sheltered, or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities. In other cases, the unfreedom links closely to the lack of public facilities and social care, such as the absence of epidemiological programs, or of organized arrangements for the health care or educational facilities, or of effective insititutions for the maintenance of local peace and order. In still other cases, the violation of freedom results directly from a denial of political and civil liberties by authoritarian regimes and from imposed restrictions on the freedom to participate in the social, political and economic life of the community.
-- Amartya Sen

At any given time today in America, there are about half a million people who are "homeless" -- they don't have a “permanent, safe, decent, affordable place to live.” Around the world there are about 100 million homeless people, and many of them are women and children. -- Robert Alan Silverstein

 

Somewhere near you, somebody right now is trying to help the indigent and poor - providing food, shelter, clothing or simple kindness.
-- Tony Snow

“When my syndicated show got canceled, the next day I still knew how to write jokes. That was a huge revelation. Because at first you think, "I won't have any shelter! What am I gonna do? The sun is hot. Very thirsty."” -- Jon Stewart

"There is much suffering in the world - physical, material, mental. The suffering of some can be blamed on the greed of others. The material and physical suffering is suffering from hunger, from homelessness, from all kinds of diseases. But the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, having no one. I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience." -- Mother Teresa (1910-1998)

* All these people talking about morality should just take a walk downtown. They don't want to go downtown because instantly they see homeless people and they don't want to. -- Neil Young

 

People will sooner aid a sick dog lying on the sidewalk than to try to find shelter for a sick person. It's too much to deal with.
--Michael Zaslow

* “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