Quotes About Stigma

Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon.

I'm sure that people must say about me, on the screen, 'Good gracious, is Jeanette MacDonald going to take off her clothes - again?

If someone asks about sexual reassignment surgery, you are supposed to say, 'Why are we talking about that?' But I am a post-op transsexual. And I am a reporter. If you can explain and talk about it, you demystify it. And if you demystify it, it's not an issue.

I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.

People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they're idiots.

We need more men to talk about their experiences of being a dad with colleagues, friends and family. It shouldn't be surprising to hear about men being good fathers and it's one of the most powerful ways we can counter the harmful 'hapless dad' stereotype.

Scripts specify 'minority' when it doesn't seem necessary. Given this is a traditionally liberal and progressive industry, it's surprisingly backwards.

It bothers me when people say 'shock comic' or 'gross-out' because that was only one type of comedy I did. There was prank comedy. Man-on-the-street-reaction comedy. Visually surreal comedy. But you do something shocking, and that becomes your label.

I'm not an epileptic but you're an arsehole . I'm important. I matter. I can do anything. I'm a sexy, strong woman that happens to have epilepsy. Do you get it? I have epilepsy but it's not who I am.

For here was the station, by the asylum: both on the outskirts, where the Victorians thought they belonged.

Even the English language is rife with words and phrases that sexualize women's walking. Among the terms for prostitutes are streetwalkers, women of the streets, women on the town, and public women (and of course phrases such as a public man, man about town, or man of the streets mean very different things than do their equivalents attached to women).

Crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering.

when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they're more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent.

Shep claimed eating cake like that so early in the morning was a 'whore's breakfast.' The rest of them didn't care. They were happy little whores who didn't worry about saving a morsel.

Éste es el precio que se paga por ser el incomprendido; te llaman demonio o te llaman dios.

The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.

I should have been put down at birth.

The authors] have been cast as racists and elitists and The Bell Curve has been dismissed as pseudoscience . . . . The book's message cannot be dismissed so easily.

WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself.

At best you have one of those debilitating conditions which come in many forms, and which some people decline to admit actually exist.

Fallen woman. The term made a sort of poetic sense. Once the fall started, it seemed it never stopped.

MOSTLY, they were ashamed of us.

it doesn't follow that all bearded men are bullies or heroes. There's the fortuneteller's beard, the Lenin cut, or again the European aristocrat's. And then there's the Castro beard and what is apparently the latest style—the beards sported by youngsters posing as artists, but just what that is called I don't know.