Quotes About Stigma

I would never want people to point at me and say, 'Well, she got herself off of food stamps, so anybody can if they work hard enough.' It's just not true.

I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's.

Popular ideas about AIDS are based on a hypothesis that does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

People ask if I'm concerned about getting pigeonholed. No one asks, 'Ellen, you've done seven straight roles in a row. Shouldn't you shake it up, do something queer?' There's still that double standard.

It bothers me when people say, 'Oh, you're so down to earth - for an actor.' Even when they don't say 'for an actor,' I feel like that's the implication. Why are the standards so low for performers?

Things got so bad that when I went shopping for a house, some people would refuse to open the door if they saw it was me standing there. And drunks would always want to challenge me.

I often hear women approvingly describe themselves or other women as feisty. Feisty, I feel, has sexist implications, as if standing up for yourself was exceptional in a woman. It sounds like a word that a raffish Lothario would use about a difficult conquest.

The reason fat men are good natured is they can neither fight nor run.

I've had six or eight hookers in my life. I never woke up the next day thinking man I'm glad I got a hooker last night.

For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.

When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy.

Proclaiming a sexual preference is something that straight men never really have to bother with.

People are so afraid to say the word "comic". It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to "graphic novel" and that disappears.

Would a real man get caught eating a twinkie?

Asian American men, Asian men have been basically eunuchs in American cinema and television.

Learned women are ridiculed because they put to shame unlearned men.

Being alone for a woman is probably much more scary than for a man. I'm all for getting over our fears by facing them head-on.

If a white man falls off a chair drunk, it's just a drunk. If a Negro does, it's the whole damn Negro race.

I don't fit into the mold of the NBA man, and I think I've been punished financially for it.

If a woman goes out with different men on different days, women only will question her character and call her all sort of names.

There are battered husbands. Apparently this happens when the woman is real big, the man is very small, and they each drink a quart of whiskey a day.

The word "autism" still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people—they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society.

It feels sadder when a black person says Nigga Because it sounds like Nigger.

I said, "No, you're physically challenged. You're breathing hard from climbing the stairs. I'm disabled.