Disability Quotes

Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.

~ Fred Rogers

Beware trying to iron out all your quirks, perceived flaws and doubts. It's often these things that help you find strength, compassion, empathy for others and heart.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

That made love—not grace—the magic ingredient. Then anew thought hit her. Perhaps love was grace. A shiver wentup her spine. What did that make anger? The antithesis ofgrace?

~ Penelope Marzec

It has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me…if much has been denied me, much, very much, has been given me…

~ Helen Keller

The most upsetting thing about Society’s attitude towards disabled people is that many millions of disabled people became disabled while trying to please Society, the very same bitch that secretly regards them as subhuman.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Boredom is probably more frequent and more tormenting if you do not have sight or hands.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A seemingly simple task like taking a bath or wearing a condom feels like multitasking to someone who suffers from hemiplegia or has only one hand.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!

~ Helen Keller

Now, Woolf calls her fictional bastion of male privilege Oxbridge, so I'll call mine Yarvard. Even though she cannot attend Yarvard because she is a woman, Judith cheerfully applies for admission at, let's call it, Smithcliff, a prestigious women's college. She is denied admission on the grounds thatthe dorms and classrooms can'taccommodate wheelchairs, that her speech pattern would interfere with her elocution lessons, and that her presence would upset the other students. There is also the suggestion that she is not good marriage material for the men at the elite college to which Smithcliff is a bride-supplying sister school. The letter inquires as to why she hasn't been institutionalized.When she goes to the administration building to protest the decision, she can't get up the flight of marble steps on the Greek Revival building. This edifice was designed to evoke a connection to the Classical world, which practiced infanticide of disabled newborns.

~ Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

I had learned quickly that life doesn't always go the way I want it to, and that's okay. I still plod on.

~ Sarah Todd Hammer

People who don't see you every day have a hard time understanding how on some days--good days--you can run three miles, but can barely walk across the parking lot on other days,' [my mom] said quietly.

~ Jennifer Starzec

I often wished that more people understood the invisible side of things. Even the people who seemed to understand, didn't really.

~ Jennifer Starzec

The video was still playing, although I didn't know why. It seemed as if the able-bodied dancers were mocking me.

~ Sarah Todd Hammer

The thought of being able to [move my arms] made me want to give up my legs [instead] since I was accustomed to using them. But, I figured that after a few hours of sitting in a wheelchair...I would switch back...in a flash.

~ Sarah Todd Hammer

The weekend was a much-needed breath of fresh air; Monday always seemed to not only take that breath right back, but add a few extra pounds to my shoulders as well.

~ Jennifer Starzec

Dancing with a spinal cord injury is a challenge like no other, but I aspired to prove to myself that I could still be phenomenal dancer even with an SCI

~ Sarah Todd Hammer

It takes a lot of confidence, and self-love and self-worth to realize that you are capable. And that you have every right to leave your lane, and to do things in the same way that other people do.

~ Allan Hennessy

You really don't have to subscribe to the life that had been written for you.

~ Allan Hennessy

God's time is slow, patient, and kind and welcomes friendship; it is a way of being in the fullness of time that is not determined by productivity, success, or linear movements toward personal goals. It is a way of love, a way of the heart.

~ John Swinton

With determination, it is possible to block out the negative things and enjoy the positive ones, despite the cons. Most importantly, it is possible to dance through everything pernicious.

~ Sarah Todd Hammer

Some people wouldn’t still be sane, if they were not religious or superstitious; some wouldn’t be disabled or dead.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Some disabled people spend a significant amount of their energy on trying to come across as abled or as not that disabled.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Whether someone is useful only matters if you value people by their use.

~ Corinne Duyvis

For a long time I spent my weary days in a fog of what might be and what has been and I guess you could say im still learning how to accept what is.

~ Nikki Rowe

Healing severe or chronic pain, I believe, includes transforming our relationship to the pain, and, ultimately, it is about transforming our relationship to who we are and to life.

~ Sarah Anne Shockley

Nobody can see pain. They have no frame of reference for pain that's happening to someone else. They can only see inactivity - which they interpret as laziness.

~ Elizabeth Haynes

I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq.

~ Sarah Palin

Next to God, Family is the best thing.

~ April Floyd

A clear line of distinctness must be drawn between the environment of the body and the environment of the mind or both the body and the mind be regarded as intertwined and be deprived of strength and efficiency. When the body is in crises, the mind must not be and when the mind is in crises, the body must not be. Such is tenacity and nimbleness

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I thought having a chronic illness would make my life detour in ways I didn't want to accept, but I've learnt that have a chronic illness made the only detours that are worth the growth.

~ Nikki Rowe

Theres a remarkable amount of strength residing in those who move forward without being able to physically move. Ones that carry the weight of illness or a disability, they battle wars most know nothing about. They are the true warriors of the world, the ones who have every reason to quit but never do.

~ Nikki Rowe

My ability is greater than my disability.

~ Nikki Rowe

Discrimination is the most polite word for abuse aka denying equal opportunity by anyone in power based on age, ancestry, color, disability (mental and physical), exercising the right to family care and medical leave, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, political affiliation, race, religious creed, sex (includes pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and related medical conditions), and sexual orientation.

~ Ramesh Lohia

Our culture teaches that sex is for the sexy, and the only way to be sexy is to be pretty. No wait--that's still too weak. Sex should properly arise from sexiness. For unsexy people--fat people, old people, funny-looking people, disabled people--to even feel sexual desire is inappropriate, perverse, disgusting. For them to engage in sexual display is offensive. For them to have sex...well, there oughta be a law.

~ Vinnie Tesla

Can the child who is Dell; be the outer emoodiment of man's quest to save himself? To cure himself?...Or, to be himself?

~ Milkweed L. Augustine

The lingerie department is the only one that she can reach in her wheelchair. Nevertheless, she is fired the next day because of complaints that a woman who is so obviously not sexually attractive selling alluring nightgowns makes customers uncomfortable. Daunted by her dismissal, she seeks consolation in the arms of the young manager and soon finds herself pregnant. Upon learningof this news, he leaves her for anondisabled woman with a fullerbustline and better homemaking skills in his inaccessible kitchen.

~ Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

It's not that there are no challenges to becoming a vegetarian or vegan, but in the media, including authors of popular books on food and food politics, contribute to the 'enfreakment' of what is so often patronizingly referred to as the vegan or vegetarian 'lifestyle.' But again, the marginalization of those who care about animals is nothing new. Diane Beers writes in her book For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States that 'several late nineteenth-century physicians concocted a diagnosable for of mental illness to explain such bizarre behavior. Sadly, they pronounced these misguided souls suffered from zoophilpsychosis.' As Beers describes, zoophilpsychosis (an excessive concern for animals) was more likely to be diagnosed in women, who were understood to be 'particularly susceptible to the malady.' As the early animal advocacy movement in Britain and the United States was largely made up of women, such charges worked to uphold the subjugation both of women and of nonhuman animals.

~ Sunaura Taylor

Cosmopolitanism seeks a _we_ that does not rely on the exclusion of _others_ but, instead, recognizes and confirms each other as part of the planetary _we_. The cosmopolitan _we_ is not grounded in a monolithic sameness but in a constant alterity and _ethical singularity_ of each individual human person regardless of one's national origin and belonging, religious affiliation, gender, race and ethnicity, class ability, or sexuality.

~ Namsoon Kang

Compassion, acceptance and LOVE is the cure to MOST of the issues that plague this world.

~ Yvonne Pierre