40 Homeless Quotes Opening Eyes and Inspiring Action

Gentle reminder: People experiencing homelessness deserve to experience the type of love that goes to battle alongside them, not against them.
- Love Beyond Walls

Our prime purpose in this life is to help others and if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.
- Dalai Lama

Freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs, if they can have no shelter, if illiteracy and disease continue to dog them.
- Nelson Mandela

Homelessness is not a choice, but rather a journey that many find themselves in.
- Asa Don Brown

The greatness of humanity is not in being human, but in being humane.
- Mahatma Gandhi

Making it so you don’t have to look at homeless people isn’t a solution to homelessness.
- Sara Luterman

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

Before you ignore another homeless person on the street, just remember that that could be someone's father or someone's mother and they have a story.
- Syesha Mercado

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

These things become the norm: that some homeless people die of cold on the streets is not news. In contrast, a ten-point drop in the stock markets of some cities is a tragedy.
- Pope Francis

Homelessness is the canary in the mine. It’s the prophetic call to all of us that there’s something radically wrong in our society if anybody is living on our streets.
- Sister Mary Scullion

Like you, I know people who drink, people who do drugs, and bosses who have tantrums and treat their subordinates like dirt. They all have good jobs. Were they to become homeless, some of them would surely also become ‘alcoholics,’ ‘addicts,’ or ‘mentally ill’.
- Elliot Liebow

Escaping poverty among the physical barriers is difficult, but with the added emotional toll, it’s almost impossible. It’s not as simple as we’d like to think.
- Terence Lester

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 Kilcher

Not everyone who’s homeless is a drug-addict or in need of mental health care. Some are normal people who’ve been knocked down, and it can happen to you too. Not all of us made bad life choices.
- Sherrilyn Kenyon

More than half of homeless youth became homeless for the first time because they were asked to leave home by a parent or caregiver.
- Dr. Resa Matthew

Home was never a dream for homeless people as they used to have their homes. Living in a home was their reality. Now we need to help them to find the lost reality — again.
- Munia Khan

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

The biggest misconception about the homeless is that they got themselves in the mess - let them get themselves out. Many people think they are simply lazy. I urge those to make a friend at a local mission and find out how wrong these assumptions are.
- Ron Hall

Fear is dangerous. It creates an environment in which it’s acceptable to treat those experiencing poverty and homelessness with anger and hate. The first step to stopping this is to realize that this fear is unfounded and dangerous.
- Terence Lester

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

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

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 Kilcher

Reminder: Being hateful towards people going through homelessness and poverty doesn’t solve homelessness and poverty.
- Terence Lester

There is a lot that happens around the world we cannot control. We cannot stop earthquakes, we cannot prevent droughts, and we cannot prevent all conflict, but when we know where the hungry, the homeless and the sick exist, then we can help.
- Jan Schakowsky

To save a life is a real and beautiful thing. To make a home for the homeless, yes, it is a thing that must be good; whatever the world may say, it cannot be wrong.
- Vincent Van Gogh

Wherever there is a human being, there exists the opportunity for an act of kindness.
- Seneca

Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you.
- Mother Teresa

A fundamental concern for others in our individual and community lives would go a long way in making the world the better place we so passionately dreamt of.
- Nelson Mandela

The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.
- Pearl S. Buck

The homeless people’s suffering belongs to amusement of our political order under a game over the right of marginalised group being transformed into citizens for merely punishment and humiliation. The Public Space Protection Orders is a penalty over one’s condition suffering – it is a fine over the disempowered for being disempowered. This act allows power to fragment the homeless into sub-humans punishable for the state of utter misery.
- Bruno De Oliveira

We live in a world where there is so much wealth. There shouldn’t be a homeless person. That’s crazy.
- Raheem De Vaughn

If sometimes our poor people have had to die of starvation, it is not because God didn’t care for them, but because you and I didn’t give, we were not instruments of love in the hands of God, to give them that bread, to give them that clothing; because we did not recognize Christ, when once more, Christ came in distressing disguise.
- Mother Teresa

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

Most people never really sat down and got to know a homeless person, but every homeless person is just a real person that was created by God and it is the same kind of different as us; they just have a different story.
- Ron Hall

How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?
- Shane Claiborne

When we bear witness when we become the situation — homelessness, poverty, illness, violence, death — the right action arises by itself.
- Bernie Glassman

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.
- Mother Teresa

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.
- Nelson Mandela