Disability Quotes

1. "When I watch 'Mad Men' and I see the patronising attitudes to women that are so shocking for all of us to watch now, I feel that I've lived and see the same evolution in this regard around disability."
Author: Aimee Mullins

2. "I'm not an advocate for disability issues. Human issues are what interest me. You can't possibly speak for a diverse group of people. I don't know what it's like to be an arm amputee, or have even one flesh-and-bone leg, or to have cerebral palsy."
Author: Aimee Mullins

3. "I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad."
Author: Andrew Greeley

4. "Parents' early responses to and interactions with a child determine how that child comes to view himself. These parents are also profoundly changed by their experiences. If you have a child with a disability, you are forever the parent of a disabled child; it is one of the primary facts about you, fundamental to the way other people perceive and decipher you. Such parents tend to view aberrance as illness until habituation and love enable them to cope with their odd new reality—often by introducing the language of identity. Intimacy with difference fosters its accommodation."
Author: Andrew Solomon

5. "I get stubborn and dig in when people tell me I can't do something and I think I can. It goes back to my childhood when I had problems in school because I have a learning disability."
Author: Ann Bancroft

6. "For me, the wheelchair symbolizes disability in a way a cane does not."
Author: Annette Funicello

7. "Glen had a disability more disfiguring than a burn and more terrifying than cancer. Glen had been born on the day after Christmas. "My parents just combine my birthday with Christmas, that's all," he explained.But we knew this was a lie. Glen's parents just wrapped a couple of his Christmas presents in birthday-themed wrapping paper, stuck some candles in a supermarket cake, and had a dinner of Christmas leftovers."
Author: Augusten Burroughs

8. "Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain."
Author: C.S. Lewis

9. "Often as a child you see someone with a learning disability or Down's Syndrome and my mum and dad were always very quick to explain exactly what was going on and to be in their own way inclusive and welcoming."
Author: Christopher Eccleston

10. "The only true disability is the inability to accept and respect differences."
Author: Comic Strip Mama

11. "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."
Author: Daniel H. Wilson

12. "Growing up in a group home, and with an undiagnosed learning disability to boot, the odds of success were not on my side. But when I joined the high school football team, I learned the value of discipline, focus, persistence, and teamwork - all skills that have proven vital to my career as a C.E.O. and social entrepreneur."
Author: Darell Hammond

13. "It is unacceptable that disabled veterans in Illinois rank at the bottom of the list when it comes to disability pay. We owe our disabled veterans more than speeches, parades and monuments."
Author: Dick Durbin

14. "Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child's death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections."
Author: Ezekiel Emanuel

15. "What's been important in my understanding of myself and others is the fact that each one of us is so much more than any one thing. A sick child is much more than his or her sickness. A person with a disability is much, much more than a handicap. A pediatrician is more than a medical doctor. You're MUCH more than your job description or your age or your income or your output."
Author: Fred Rogers

16. "If Republicans are aiming for the heart, for compassion, the last thing they should do is abandon the sanctity of life. Instead, they should tell Americans that they believe in the dignity and value of every human being, from the defenseless unborn child, to the newborn with a disability, to the 90-year-old dealing with dementia."
Author: Gary Bauer

17. "In other words, Foxx represented what Sarah Palin (speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Greensboro three weeks before the election) called "the real America," by which she did not mean fallow farms and disability checks and crack."
Author: George Packer

18. "Body acceptance means, as much as possible, approving of and loving your body, despite its "imperfections", real or perceived. That means accepting that your body is fatter than some others, or thinner than some others, that your eyes are a little crooked, that you have a disability that makes walking difficult, that you have health concerns that you have to deal with — but that all of that doesn't mean that you need to be ashamed of your body or try to change it. Body acceptance allows for the fact that there is a diversity of bodies in the world, and that there's no wrong way to have one."
Author: Golda Poretsky

19. "The goal of NIH research is to acquire new knowledge to help prevent, detect, diagnose, and treat disease and disability, from the rarest genetic disorder to the common cold."
Author: Ike Skelton

20. "The Magistrate suffered from the disability of a free-thinking turn of mind and from a life that was barren and dreary to match."
Author: J.G. Farrell

21. "Around 20 million premature and low-birth weight babies are born every year and are at high risk of death or disability because of hypothermia."
Author: Jane Chen

22. "In Congress, while the House's proposed defense budget calls for significant increases, it also cuts 11 billion dollars from veterans spending - including healthcare and disability pay. Be clear: we can't equate spending on veterans with spending on defense."
Author: Jennifer M. Granholm

23. "Being unconscious is the ultimate disability."
Author: Jessa Gamble

24. "I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However, this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health."
Author: John Forbes Nash Jr.

25. "Outside of school, though, we were often defined by our disabilities. We were "handicapped"—a bit like a species. Often when people have a disability, it's the disability that other people see rather than all the other abilities that coexist with their particular difficulty. It's why we talk about people being "disabled" rather than "having a disability." One of the reasons that people are branded by their disability is that the dominant conception of ability is so narrow. But the limitations of this conception affect everyone in education, not just those with "special needs." These days, anyone whose real strengths lie outside the restricted field of academic work can find being at school a dispiriting experience and emerge from it wondering if they have any significant aptitudes at all."
Author: Ken Robinson

26. "In those long-ago days I saw a daughter with a disability. Now I see a beautiful, engaging person with a different ability, one that has blessed her with extra gifts and special perceptions."
Author: Lee Woodruff

27. "She would prove to everyone she could do everything. She wouldn't let her disability be an excuse, wouldn't give anyone reason to pity her."
Author: Liz Grace Davis

28. "People didn't always see a person with a disability who had to use a ramp or elevator as people who have been given unnecessary privileges. But I run into that often now. People are saying, 'Why do we have to go to great expense for these people?'"
Author: Major Owens

29. "I take advantage of every thing I can - age, hair, disability - because my cause is just."
Author: Marjory Stoneman Douglas

30. "Disability is a matter of perception. If you can do just one thing well, you're needed by someone."
Author: Martina Navratilova

31. "With the NYPD, but I'm retired on disability—gunshot wounds, though my wife says I'm also morally disabled—and I've taken this job as a contract agent with the Feds,"
Author: Nelson DeMille

32. "It's hard enough to work and raise a family when your kids are all healthy and relatively normal, but when you add on some kind of disability or disease, it can just be such a burden."
Author: Patricia Heaton

33. "The world has a fast-growing problematic disability, which forges bonds in families, causes people to communicate in direct and clear ways, cuts down meaningless social interaction, pushes people to the limit with learning about themselves, whilst making them work together to make a better world. It's called Autism – and I can't see anything wrong with it, can you? Boy I'm glad I also have this disability!"
Author: Patrick Jasper Lee

34. "Think of it: a disability is usually defined in terms of what is missing. … But autism … is as much about what is abundant as what is missing, an over-expression of the very traits that make our species unique."
Author: Paul Collins

35. "What has God given you? Moses had a stick, David had a slingshot, and Paul had a pen. Mother Teresa possessed a love for the poor; Billy Graham, a gift for preaching; and Joni Eareckson Tada, a disability. What did they have in common? A willingness to let God use whatever they had, even when it didn't seem very useful. If you will assess what you have to offer in terms of your time, your treasure, and your talents, you will have a better understanding of how you might uniquely serve.The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns"
Author: Richard Stearns

36. "Placing one foot in front of the other, I've climbed to higher lengths. Reaching beyond my own limitations, to show my inner strength. No obstacle too hard, for this warrior to overcome. I'm just a man on a mission, to prove my disability hasn't won."
Author: Robert M. Hensel

37. "So, for example, if a child is labeled as having a learning disability, it has very concrete consequences for the kinds of services and potentially accommodations that child will get."
Author: Robert Sternberg

38. "Surgeons always underestimate the pain and disability involved in what they do to people."
Author: Robert Winston

39. "The only disability in life is a bad attitude."
Author: Scott Hamilton

40. "Self-pity is the worst disability a person can have, Callie. It's crippling."
Author: Shelley Terrell

41. "I mean, I may not hold the record in cleaning house either, but if I've got old milk cartons that smell like maggots I bundle them up and put them out.""I'm on a disability pension'" he said. "I'm socially incompetent."
Author: Stieg Larsson

42. "I was slightly brain damaged at birth, and I want people like me to see that they shouldn't let a disability get in the way. I want to raise awareness - I want to turn my disability into ability."
Author: Susan Boyle

43. "It is a lonely existence to be a child with a disability which no-one can see or understand, you exasperate your teachers, you disappoint your parents, and worst of all you know that you are not just stupid."
Author: Susan Hampshire

44. "Finally, especially in the case of medical-response canines and those that serve handlers with invisible disabilities, it's not merely the necessity of the dog that's questioned but also the existance of the disability itself. And for these partnerships, some of the greatest problems arise."
Author: Susannah Charleson

45. "His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few."
Author: Terry Pratchett

46. "At the cross, Jesus subjects himself to disability, and his resurrected body continues to bear his scars as a sign of God's solidarity with humanity."
Author: Thomas E. Reynolds

47. "Nobody loved her and she wouldn't have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability."
Author: Toni Morrison

48. "The world worries about disability more than disabled people do."
Author: Warwick Davis

49. "I've found that it's actually more of a disability to be tall than short. I have no problem fitting into plane toilets etc, and the adaptations made for wheelchair users - such as the lowering of bank machines - work for me as well."
Author: Warwick Davis

50. "Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment."
Author: William J. Brennan Jr.

Disability Quotes Pictures