Quotes About AIDS

By '95 - in New York, alone - more Americans had died of AIDS than were killed in Vietnam.

The snowshoer had written about Reagan—just one sentence, after seeing her friends who were dying of AIDS. "If or when there's another plague, I hope America has a better plague president than Ronald Reagan," the little English teacher wrote.

For seven of the eight years he was president, Reagan would not say the AIDS word.

HIV AIDS is a disease with stigma. And we have learned with experience, not just with HIV AIDS but with other diseases, countries for many reasons are sometimes hesitant to admit they have a problem.

Abstinence, being faithful and correct and consistent condom use are the only ways to successfully reach everyone when discussing HIV prevention. I believe that the abstinence message alone does not solve the AIDS epidemic.

Years ago I did a particularly angry set onstage. I talked about AIDS, the end of the world, and how silly and hopeless life was. A guy came up to me after the show and asked, "Why comedy?" That was all he said. I was dumbfounded.

and of AIDS. The virus too small to imagine travelling through our fluids, even a drop or two of saliva or cunt slime, and unlocking our antibodies with its little picks, so that our insides lose their balance and we topple into pneumonia, into starvation. Love and death, they can't be pried apart anymore.

He takes two tea bags in a four-ounce cup and he doesn't mince words: when a pair of earnest British journalists once asked him how he thought the tigers could be saved, his answer, "AIDS," caught them off guard. "But don't you care about people?" one of them asked. "Not really," he replied. "Especially not the Chinese.

It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.

The closest thing to the human immunodeficiency viruses, Hahn explained, are the simian equivalents, SIVs. But "simian immunodeficiency virus" is a huge misnomer. The virus doesn't harm the immune systems of these natural hosts; they don't even seem to get sick. "If we could figure out how simian immune systems deal with the viruses, we might have a clue to controlling AIDS," she said. "That very hope drives my work.

In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes -- homosexuality, sexual disease, and death -- about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.

The reality is that past efforts to assist girls have sometimes backfired. In 1993, Senator Tom Harkin wanted to help Bangladeshi girls laboring in sweatshops, so he introduced legislation that would have banned imports made by workers under the age of fourteen. Bangladeshi factories promptly fired tens of thousands of these young girls, and many of them ended up in brothels and are presumably now dead of AIDS.

Anybody who has spent time in Indian brothels and also, say, at Indian brick kilns knows that it is better to be enslaved working a kiln. Kiln workers most likely live together with their families, and their work does not expose them to the risk of AIDS, so there's always hope of escape down the road.

At the start of the AIDS epidemic, American boys with hemophilia lived as long as those without the disease. By the end of the 1980s, among the ten thousand American males with severe hemophilia, nine thousand were infected with HIV. By 1994, more than 25 percent of the American hemophiliac population had died from AIDS. Most were children and adolescents.

We've taken on the major health problems of the poorest - tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria - in four countries. We've scored some victories in the sense that we've cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.

When Larry Kramer tells Mathilde Krim in Interview about the closeted gay man at the National Institutes of Health who buried the AIDS data for two years, that's when I understand how doomed we were before we ever knew. It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.

And if the government was stone-deaf, the press was mute. The media are convinced in 1987 that they're doing a great job reporting the AIDS story, and there's no denying they've grasped the horror. But for four years they let the bureaucracies get away with passive genocide

It's wonderful that so many people want to contribute to fighting aids or malaria. But, if somebody isn't paying attention to the overall health system in the country, a whole lot of money can be wasted.