Quotes of Disability - somelinesforyou

“ It is unacceptable that disabled veterans in Illinois rank at the bottom of the list when it comes to disability pay. We owe our disabled veterans more than speeches, parades and monuments. ”

- Dick Durbin

“ Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape. ”

- W. H. Auden

“ Disability is a matter of perception. If you can do just one thing well, you're needed by someone. ”

- Martina Navratilova

“ I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability… but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad. ”

- Andrew Greeley

“ A large portion of the chronic homeless are disabled enough that they would be eligible for disability benefits and many already get them. But when the money runs out they stay with relatives or get put up in a shelter. ”

- Pat Lynch

“ There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naive that may have been, it was a good deal less naive than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end. ”

- Flannery O’Connor

“ Each handicap is like a hurdle in a steeplechase, and when you ride up to it, if you throw your heart over, the horse will go along, too. ”

- Lawrence Bixby

“ A born writer is born scrofulous; his career is an accident dictated by physical or circumstantial disabilities. ”

- Dylan Thomas

“ As a kid I had a hard time reading in school. I was the kid who would go one period a day to the class for kids with learning disabilities. ”

- Vince Vaughn

“ PLATONIC, adj. Pertaining to the philosophy of Socrates. Platonic Love is a fool's name for the affection between a disability and a frost. ”

- Ambrose Bierce

“ The only disability in life is a bad attitude. ”

- Scott Hamilton

“ We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high. ”

- Florida Scott Maxwell

“ It is ability, not disability that counts. ”

- Edgar J. Helms

“ It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven't done badly. People won't have time for you if you are always angry or complaining. ”

- Stephen Hawking

“ I have often been asked, "Do not people bore you?" I do not understand quite what that means. I suppose the calls of the stupid and curious, especially of newspaper reporters, are always inopportune. I also dislike people who try to talk down to my understanding… ”

- Helen Keller

“ The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate. ”

- Charles Horton Cooley

“ The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost ought to entail the profound contempt of society. ”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

“ The sense of an entailed disadvantage — the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender. ”

- George Eliot

“ There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom… ”

- Cormac McCarthy

“ Even this disability from which I suffer I have assumed by the very fact that I live; I surpass ittoward my own projects, I make of it the necessary obstacle for my being and I cannot be crippledwithout choosing myself as crippled. This means that I choose the way I constitute my disability (as'unbearable', 'humiliating, 'to be hidden', 'to be revealed to all'). ”

- Jean Paul Sartre

“ Old or young, healthy as a horse or a person with a disability that hasn't kept you down, man or woman, Native American, native born, immigrant, straight or gay — whatever; the test ought to be I believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence… ”

- Bill Clinton

“ I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However, this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. ”

- John Nash

“ We have a responsibility as a state to protect our most vulnerable citizens: our children, seniors, people with disabilities. That is our moral obligation. But there is an economic justification too - we all pay when the basic needs of our citizens are unmet. ”

- John Lynch

“ My son Alessandro was always so terrific with his sister, and the three of us-Alessandro, Allegra and myself-made the highs as high as we could, and mostly tried to laugh at the lows. I have written about some of the difficulties a learning disability can cause a family, but there is always an up side to everything. ”

- Anne Ford

“ I put up a huge wall of denial. It was years before I was able to break through it… accepting that your child has a disability, especially one like LD that cannot be seen or easily diagnosed, is one of the hardest things to come to terms with. ”

- Anne Ford

“ I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place. ”

- Chuck Close

“ Though people with disabilities have become more vocal in recent years, we still constitute a very small minority. Yet the Beautiful People - the slender, fair and perfect ones - form a minority that may be even smaller. ”

- Debra Kent

“ When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity. We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group. ”

- Lewis Thomas

“ A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person. ”

- Barbara Ehrenreich

“ In our time, respect for the right to life calls us to defend the sick and the dying, persons with disabilities and birth defects, and all who are weak and vulnerable. And this self-evident truth calls us to value and to protect the lives of innocent children waiting to be born. ”

- George W. Bush
  • 1