Quotes About Disability

Disability scholars Andrienne Asch and Erik Parens, in their seminal discussion of the problem, wrote,'Pre-natal diagnosis reinforces the medical model that disability itself, not societal discrimination against people with disabilities, is the problem to be solved.

El analfabetismo y la pobreza son discapacidades, como también lo son la imbecilidad, la obesidad y la apatía. La fe es una discapacidad en la medida en que restringe el interés personal; el ateísmo es una discapacidad, puesto que es una coraza contra la esperanza. Incluso el poder puede considerarse una discapacidad por el aislamiento al que condena a quienes lo ejercen.

Disability is not predictive of the happiness of either the parent or the child, which reflects the larger puzzle that people who have won the lottery are, in the long run and on average, only marginally happier than amputees—people in each category having adjusted rather quickly to their new normal.

Disabled people are protected by fragile laws, and if they are judged to have an identity rather than an illness, they may forfeit those safeguards.

People with disabilities make up the largest minority in America; they constitute 15 percent of the population though only 15 percent of those were born with their disability and about a third are over sixty-five…

In typical circumstances, to have children who won't care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation.

Ability is a tyranny of the majority. If most people could flap their arms and fly, the inability to do so would be a disability.

Depression as described in DSM-IV is the leading cause of disability in the United States and abroad for persons over the age of five. Worldwide, including the developing world, depression accounts for more of the disease burden, as calculated by premature death plus

healthy life-years lost to disability, than anything else but heart disease. Depression claims more years than war, cancer, and AIDS put together. Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth.

Those, disabled people, however, may be angered by the prospect of interventions that would make them function more like non-disabled people without mitigating the hard reality of their disabling condition. Some may even curse the contraptions that keep them going.

Cerebral palsy is any disability caused by damage to the cerebrum before birth, just afterward, or in the first three years of life.

An untreated severe cleft palate can have dire consequences and is undeniably a disability. But there is no simple equation whereby the existence of the fix means that the condition is no longer a disability; rectifying a condition is not the same thing as forestalling

All kinds of attributes make one less able. Illiteracy and poverty are disabilities, and so are stupidity, obesity, and boringness. Extreme age and extreme youth are both disabilities. Faith is a disability insofar as it constrains you from self-interest; atheism is a disability inasmuch as it shields you from hope. One might see power as a disability, too, for the isolation in which it imprisons those who wield it.

Some parents manufacture an affirmative construction of their child's disability to disguise their despair, while others have a deep and genuine experience of joy in caring for disabled children, and that sometimes the first stance can generate the second.

The cycle of life runs in actuality from disability to temporary ability back to disability, and that only if you are among the most fortunate.

Faith is a disability insofar as it constrains you from self-interest; atheism is a disability inasmuch as it shields you from hope. One might see power as a disability, too, for the isolation in which it imprisons those who wield it.

osteogenesis imperfecta

Spiritualism provided an important audience for radical reform and a source of affirmation for embattled radical leaders. In their zeal for "self-ownership," Spiritualists advocated a broad woman's rights program, combating every disability imposed by church, state, or social convention.

Having a disability changes your whole life, not just your attitude.

Often eating took considerable extra time, since he could hardly see his food, groping with a fork or spoon, enforcedly omnivorous. "Blind men wear spotted pants," Dorothy teased, telling him to wash his...

Let me remind all of us--disabled and nondisabled--that every time we defend our intelligence, we come close to disowning intellectually disabled people. We imply that it might be okay to exclude, devalue, and institutionalize people who actually live with body-mind conditions that impact the ways they think, understand, and process information. The only way out of this trap is to move toward, not away from, intellectually disabled people, to practice active solidarity.

But in today's world, being seen as intellectually, cognitively, or developmentally disabled is dangerous because intelligence and verbal communication are entrenched markers of personhood.

The mannerisms that help define gender - the way in which people walk,swing their hips, gesture with their hands, move their mouths and eyes when they talk, take up space - are all based upon how non disabled people move…The construct of gender depends not only upon the male body and female body, but also on the non disabled body.

My disability was my justification! It was my excuse for failing to engage with the world.