Quotes About Stigma

The stigma with country is it's not cool. That's wrong. Country is very cool. I look at award shows, I look at how country is represented. Country is represented with an asterisk. We have to perform collaborations. We have to perform a tribute. We can't perform by ourselves.

I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place.

I am regarded as a usurper, as an imposter and dilettante, because I do technically come from the wrong side of the tracks in musical terms.

Every teenager deals in his or her own sexuality and has to face it and figure out how it can coincide with the rest of their lives in a healthy manner. And try to navigate it in our modern society, which is wrought with stigma and taboo and repression, and sort of as a result, these inner monsters that some teenagers really struggle with.

I think when you come from a reality show, nobody really respects you from the movie industry or from the WWE industry.

I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.

I was at Yale from 1953 to 1957, and I tried to commit suicide in my freshman year because I was gay, and I thought I was the only person in the school who was. I was just totally and utterly miserable.

One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was 'gravely disabled.' To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.

I was always the shame of the family - the one Yankee who was actually born in the North.

People tend to look at mental health differently than physical health. If someone tears their ACL, we don't expect them to run 30 yards for a touchdown. They need to be treated and have the time to rest and heal, It's the same thing for mental health.

There are two drawbacks to steroids, one is the potential problems with your health and the second one is it is very easy for people to dismiss everything you have put into it by saying, 'yeah but he takes steroids.'

Yeah! I got type-two diabetes! I'm sure there's going to be some media scandal now, saying I got it because I gained and lost weight for movie parts or something - but I doubt that.

Yeah, a lot of people think I'll be a tortured nutcase when they meet me.

We're normal people. Don't be scared because we are in a chair. People don't understand that. They think, 'Oh, a wheelchair, something's wrong with their heads, something's just not right.' Well yeah, we may be a little twisted, but no more than anyone else.

One year they asked me to be poster boy - for birth control.

I'm tired of hearing sin called sickness and alcoholism a disease. It is the only disease I know of that we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spread.

Everyone thought I was going to die like a year later, they didn't know. So I helped educate sports, and then the world, that a man living with HIV can play basketball. He's not going to give it to anybody by playing basketball.

For years, decades, the system has taught us to stay quiet. They've made us believe that those who take to the streets to speak up are crazy, criminals, troublemakers.

Most of the women who have offered themselves for public office over the years have done so, I believe, more because of the 'dirt' than in spite of it.

It doesn't matter if that felony happened three weeks ago or thirty-five years ago - for the rest of your life, you've got to check that box, knowing full well the odds are sky-high your application is going straight to the trash.

I believe every abortion is a tragedy.

What having a Down's syndrome child isn't - and I feel very strongly about this - is a tragedy. All those pregnancy books you read when you are expecting refer to Down's syndrome as if it were the worst possible outcome, and it's not.

It's tragic when people think feminism is a dirty word.

When people affected by epilepsy are reluctant to expose their condition, the public remains in the dark about it - a tragic irony that has made patient care and raising funds for research more than challenging.