Disability Stigma Quotes

My best friend is disabled. There's nothing he hates more than being left out of the jokes, to be treated with kid gloves. That's the insult.

People with disabilities can grow up thinking they have a weakness because they are told, You will never do this properly; you will never walk properly or talk properly.' That's all they hear. But you have to look past that.

Britain's way of dealing with disability is just to try and pretend it's not happening. A swift sweep under the carpet.

There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don't see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation.

A lot of times, we look at people who have disabilities as, 'Oh, we can't invite these people here or there.' And I hate that, because it's inappropriate. It's so weird to me when people say they don't have friends who have disabilities.

I won't talk about someone's mother. I won't talk about their girlfriend or their wife, but if you have a deformity, I would talk about that.

A lot of people don't want to hire disabled actors. They think you're going to take twice as long over a shot, or they don't want have to put up a ramp for disabled access. They think, 'Why would I do that when I can just hire an able-bodied actor to play the disabled character?'

Watch me when people say deaf and dumb, or deaf mute, and I give them a look like you might get if you called Denzel Washington the wrong name.

I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want people to feel sorry for me. I didn't want people to see me as disabled. I wanted to live a life of adventure and stories.

Why do we let blind people and people in wheelchairs become citizens? I feel sorry for cripples, but that doesn't mean I want them in my country.

People with Parkinson's are not some weird people on the edge of human experience.

To me, the remarkable thing is it's pretty much unanimous the way blind people have been perceived in all cultures and for millennia. The first is, if they can't see, they must be stupid. The second one is, and this is a very old one, that blindness is such a terrible thing that it must be a curse from God for some evil that you committed.

I know what it's like to be growing up, called 'deaf and mute' and 'deaf and dumb.' They're words that are very degrading and demeaning to people who are deaf and hard of hearing. It's almost... it's almost libelous, if you want to say that.

One of the most persistent misconceptions about blindness is that it is a curse from God for misdeeds perpetrated in a past life, which cloaks the blind person in spiritual darkness and makes him not just dangerous, but evil.

Nothing like quoting Silence of the Lambs for people to question what kind of disability you have.

I have two dogs. If I had retarded children, I'd be a hero. And yet, the dogs are pretty much the same thing.

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?'

I hate the words 'handicapped' and 'disabled'. They imply that you are less than whole. I don't see myself that way at all.

Disability has become a form of permanent welfare for a lot of folks. It's not that hard to prove a mental illness or mental issues or pain issues.

I think that's where it comes into play, when you are just looking at a document or whatever and you see the word "disability." Does that automatically trigger something in you that denies someone their personhood?

When you have a disability, people think you are weak. They think they can prey on you.

Half of Hollywood has more prosthetic in their body than I do, but we don't think of them as disabled. You amputate part of a nose, that's 'enhancement'. You put a prosthetic in a breast cavity, that's 'augmentation'. But you amputate part of a limb and put a prosthetic there, it's 'disability'?

You don't call retarded people retards. It's bad taste. You call your friends retards when they are acting retarded.

How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibilty, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man with low intelligence.