Quotes About Stigma

It was tough to cope with the pressure of having to talk about menstruation, but now with 'Newsweek' splashing it as the cover story, I thing the point I wished to make has found its mark.

As young as 10 I started fancying boys. It's a common experience but I just wished I wasn't gay up until the age of 18 or 19.

Somebody with Debbie Reynolds' features doesn't get cast as the Wicked Witch.

I did 'Beetlejuice,' and it was a big movie, but it didn't help my high-school experience. In fact, it made it worse. I was a freak and a witch.

I was offered, within one year, three different witch roles. It was almost like the world was saying - or the studios were saying - 'We don't know what to do with you.'

I don't find it humiliating when they call me a psychopath or witch.

My heart's desire was freedom... 400 years ago they'd have burned me as a witch or dunked me like a big biscuit.

Usually, witches are the little side character... a bad female character that comes in and leaves.

I don't think there's much tolerance for people who are a little different or withdrawn or quiet. They always seem to be the ones who stick out the most, the ones who want to just shy away and withdraw.

If you walk down the street, within five minutes you will see someone who is morbidly obese or obese.

There is no health without mental health; mental health is too important to be left to the professionals alone, and mental health is everyone's business.

People can say whatever they want about you without knowing the facts. They can criticize you without even knowing you, and hate you when they don't even know you. All of a sudden, you're, like, the bin Laden of America. Osama bin Laden is the only one who knows exactly what I'm going through.

There remains a degree of anti-black intellectualism in entertainment. Middle and upper-middle class blacks have often been portrayed as buffoons in popular culture; witness the characters of Carlton Banks on 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' and Braxton P. Hartnabrig on 'The Jamie Foxx Show.'

Several politicians and wives of politicians have been public about their experiences with depression or bipolar illness, including Lawton Chiles, Patrick Kennedy, Tipper Gore and Kitty Dukakis. Each made a tremendous difference by doing so.

Rock stars' wives have never been given an easy time. They weren't nice about Linda McCartney till she died.

For older actresses, the story is still the same. They are either subservient wives taking care of their husbands - like that typical age-old character of a woman, who serves her husband a hot cup of tea as soon as he comes home; or they are mothers dependent on their sons.

In our society leaving baby with Daddy is just one step above leaving the kids to be raised by wolves or apes.

When I first started in this field there were all kinds of stereotypes about autism, as if these were children from another planet, or children who had been brought up by wolves, that they weren't part of our population and were somehow separate.

Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it's quite the opposite: a woman having large breasts makes men stupid.

When a woman has lost her chastity she will shrink from nothing.

Few people realize what a handicap it is to be what people call a beautiful woman. I'm glad, of course, that I don't look like an unmade bed, but too often, I'm just taken at face value. And there aren't many men who believe a beautiful woman can have any brains.

Madam Walker's name gets thrown out as either the savior of black women's hair or she's the evil devil.

I think today women are very scared to celebrate themselves, because then they just get labeled.

You know, women are as promiscuous as men and yet, of course, people are inhibited from having an affair or a relationship because the real-world consequences are a drag.