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?

Hoffman’s remark asks the listener to collapse the distance between “us” and people society labels as failures or threats. By imagining a homeless person or addict as a baby—once innocent, loved, and full of possibility—he reframes stigma as a story of human vulnerability and contingency rather than moral defect. The rhetorical question (“You don’t think they were cute…?”) challenges the ease with which we dehumanize others and invites compassion grounded in shared origins. Implicitly, it points to the role of circumstance, trauma, illness, and social neglect in shaping lives, and it critiques the comfort of believing that suffering is always deserved.