Quotes About Stigma

Some people in the industry warned me that I'd ruin my career, miss out on possible jobs, and potentially put my life in danger if I ever came out.

Money and one of its embodiments, social class, are both riveting and mysterious to children. And if we don't challenge today's stigma around class status, it will warp a new generation's experience of an even more important class - the kind in which they learn. And that's one thing we simply can't afford.

Adult fantasy gets a bad name. You think of Xena - Warrior Princess. If you don't do it expensively, it becomes tacky and you end up just appealing to 45-year-old single men.

I'm wary of the word 'inventing,' because in the British psyche the word 'inventor' is immediately linked with 'mad'. For me, inventing is problem-solving.

I'm wary when legislators say the solution to school shootings is mental health care, because it suggests that people who are mentally ill are violent, and that's just not true.

I was horrified to find out that a startling percentage of women, even in Bengaluru, do not go out or wash their hair during their periods.

Once you've been painted as something it's very hard, especially when you're young, to wash that off.

Sin is etched into women's very form. To the devil with her form, then.

She looks just as I imagined. Scuzzy blonde hair, blemished skin, mean eyes. A walking, sentient yeast infection.

No Tank Tops, the sign had said at Youth Guidance. Because it was presumed the parents didn't know better than to show up to court looking like hell. The sign might have said Your Poverty Reeks.

The common man means the average man, a typical man, a decent hardworking person of modest dreams and resources. A common woman is a woman who looks cheap. A woman who looks cheap doesn't have to be respected, and so she has a certain value, a certain cheap value.

mental illness, depression, was indeed an illness with a physiological basis. It wasn't a sign of failure. I wasn't a failure.

A few of the researchers seem to think that once a borderline, always a borderline. That you can't cure it—you can only control it. That a lot of people are destined to live their lives in and out of institutions, that there isn't much hope.

How very American, he thought, to look at a disease as homosexual or heterosexual, as if viruses had the intelligence to choose between different inclinations of human behavior.

What society judged was not the severity of the disease but the social acceptability of the individuals affected with it…

Most importantly, the epidemic was only news when it was not killing homosexuals. In this sense, AIDS remained a fundamentally gay disease, newsworthy only by the virtue of the fact that it sometimes hit people who weren't gay

When a London gay switchboard's lines broke down because they were so overwhelmed with AIDS calls, telephone company employees refused to fix them because they were afraid of contracting AIDS through the wiring.

When I was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers.

Although it too was imported, coffee did not carry the same social or political stigma as tea. Americans started brewing beans instead of leaves during the Revolution and never looked back.

Why is the Right so afraid of being called racist? Why do they attack their allies on the Right, even calling us racist?

Before I came out, the thought of someone calling me gay, even when I knew very well that I was, was petrifying.

People are marked down for their age - once you get past 30, people look at you a bit funny. When you get to 35, the questions are all, 'When are you going to stop?' Calm down!

It's important to me for the world to see black men in different capacities - capacities in which they're probably not used to seeing them.

As a female comic, if you talk about sex in any capacity, you will be branded a 'sex comic,' so I might as well go full force on it.