Quotes About Disability

It is your disability that makes you unique, deprived of the privileges that you are nevertheless entitled to through your birthright, outside the stereotypes of your social position, in spite of it being part of your very flesh.

Here is what I say to the children who are our future: never underestimate how denial and a good old-fashioned mild learning disability can team up to come off as unwavering self-confidence.

These days the technology can solve our problems and then some. Solutions may not only erase physical or mental deficits but leave patients better off than "able-bodied" folks. The person who has a disability today may have a superability tomorrow.

The dissemination of advanced implantable technology will likely be just as ruthlessly democratic as the ailments it is destined to treat. Meaning that, someday soon, we may have a new class of very smart, very fast people - yesterday's disabled and elderly.

The Paralympic Games actually turned my whole mentality around about disability. When you're in the Paralympic athletes' village and there are 4,000 disabled people, you stop seeing disability. Totally.

There's an assumption in many of these cultures that these children are mentally retarded, when in fact they're not at all. I saw how the operation affects the child, as well as the child's family and often the village.

I have a very simple philosophy. One has to separate the abilities from the disabilities. The fact I cannot walk, that I need crutches or a scooter or whatever it is, has nothing to do with my playing the violin.

Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.

In many ways, I'm incredibly lucky to have been born with my impairment and that it's visible. It means my path has been predictable.

In China they don't mind getting their cameras out, but I try to go with the flow. In countries where there is not so much disability visible on the streets, they want to know who you are and what you are doing.

I was the only student she'd taught who'd actually known any deaf people. Most of the students in my courses were there because they'd seen a movie or read a Helen Keller book.

In fact, an alarming percentage of deaf children graduate high school with a third-grade reading ability.

Immediately the stranger would bend over toward me and ask, "Does he lip-read?" as if Dad had suddenly become as inanimate as a cigar store Indian.

A conservative survey once showed that the average deaf high school graduate has a third-grade reading ability.

Like virtually all schools for the deaf at that time, the Indiana State School emphasized oral skills: speaking and lipreading.

In fact, sometimes I was sure that the reason people stared at you with your crutches and wheelchair had nothing to do with your disabilities, and everything to do with the fact that you had abilities that they only dreamed of.

When the elevator doors open there is only one other person inside it, a homeless man with electric blue sunglasses and six plastic grocery bags filled with rags. Close the doors, dammit, he yells as soon as we step inside. Can't you see I'm blind? [...] From the back, the homeless man shoves between us, his bounty rustling in his arms. Stop yelling, he shouts. though we stand in utter silence. Can't you tell that I'm deaf?

We are a society that treats people with disabilities with condescension and pity, not dignity and respect.

If you don't like something, change it. My parents expected me to stay in my office job as an administrator at the Co-op because I'm disabled, but I said no and changed my whole life.

I have a learning disability when it comes to languages, I envy actors like Prakash Raj and my kids who do it with such ease.

Larry Drake - I love his work... He plays a very disabled character like the role I'm playing.

Recognising that someone cannot work should not be a license to stop thinking about what support they might need.

In the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury--or else a disability.

In the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury – or else a disability: only tormented persons want truth. Man is like other animals, wants food and success and women, not truth. Only if the mind Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness: then it hates its life-cage and seeks further.