Samantha Morton Quotes

Sometimes I can tackle an issue -homelessness, tobacco litigation, insurance fraud, the death penalty - and wrap a good story around it. These are the best books, the ones with a story and a message.

I've said that, that I've felt like as Christians and particularly even as Republicans, we needed to address issues that touched the broader perspective, and that included disease, hunger, poverty, homelessness, the environment.

For 18 years I have resisted talking about current events. I am not going to start now.

To show that a comedian on stage in India talking about sanitation or in South Africa talking about HIV and AIDS awareness, if you follow the joke into their lives, you can see that, like, oh, these things aren't just contrived in joke books. This is real life. I think the best comedians have that bravery and courage to say, Oh, this is what it is.

I don't feel that I'm particularly political. I'm interested in politics; I'll express my view if I feel strongly about something, but humanitarian issues, I think, are slightly different.

In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective.

The church should lead on issues of housing and affordability.

An experience that shaped me happened early in my TV career when I filmed in Mozambique, Angola and Bangladesh for 'Blue Peter' and Comic Relief. Places with extreme poverty. When you see that first-hand as a young person, you take it with you for life.

It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.

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.

Awareness is very, very important because we're living in a world which is literally shrinking by the day. We are global citizens. So, for us not to be aware of what's happening to our neighbor is almost sad. Once you're aware, then you can decide what cause you want to dedicate your time to.

Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.

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.

[On her father, Ronald Reagan:] How do you argue with someone who states that the people who are sleeping on the grates of the streets of America 'are homeless by choice'?

I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.

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.

They take the paper and they read the headlines. So they've heard of unemployment and they've heard of bread-lines. And they philanthropically cure them all by getting up a costume charity ball.

I've always had a social awareness. My favorite channel on TV is BBC News 24. For a while, I had to have it on repeat in my house. I've always been interested in what's going on in the world.

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?

Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise.

No matter how much you give a homeless person for tea... you never get that tea.

I was out there for 12 days. There are more beggars in Soho than there are in Kabul.

I really appreciate when people use their fame and their voice for more than just self-promotion, starting a dialogue about a topic or an issue much bigger than themselves.

There aren't enough professionals to solve the world's problems. There will never be enough doctors to solve the health problems of the world. There will never be enough teachers to solve the education problems of the world - illiteracy. There will never be enough missionaries to care and comfort and share the Good News. It has to be done by normal, ordinary people.

[Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.