Larry Kramer Quotes

I thought, wait and see—maybe it [AIDS] is not as hot as some are making it appear. I definitely admit to a gross underestimate. We're running scared.

I started to write about science and medicine at the 'Washington Post,' in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

AIDS didn’t announce itself when it arrived, and it was only after it started taking its toll that we realized our problem.

AIDS is the biggest challenge, the major disaster facing this country and we would have wished for something more specific and far-reaching.

As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.

If Carter had been there when the AIDS crisis came up, it would have been a whole different story. It could have been treated like a legitimate disease.

HIV/AIDS has no boundaries.

AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.

I was a gay man living in the epicenter of 20th-century America's worst health epidemic.

History will not judge HIV/AIDS kindly... the harshest words will be reserved for how the world responded, or rather failed to respond, to the epidemic.

We didn't exist. Ronald Reagan didn't say the word 'AIDS' until 1987. I've tried desperately to get a meeting in the White House; Gay Men's Health Crisis is already an established organization. I have a certain presence.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

In Africa through the 1990s, with notable exceptions in Senegal and Uganda, nearly all the ruling powers denied they had a problem with AIDS.

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.

If a country denies it has AIDS, that country will inevitably become an even greater victim.

One out of every 100 American men is HIV positive. The rate of infection has reached epidemic proportions in 40 developing nations.

If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.

The reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you've lost the ability to contain it.

I remember specifically, in the summer of 2002, the rate of women infected with HIV/AIDS was beginning to match the rate of men, and nobody was talking about it. It was as if it was on nobody else's radar. I had made up my mind to do something about it.

It entered Egypt at the end of the season when the grasslands turn green, hence in the autumn of the year 748…This epidemic was distinctive in that it did not particularly affect one region and leave another untouched but spread to all parts of the Earth, in the East as in the West…Furthermore, it encompassed not just the human species but also the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and the animals in the field…

We could conquer cancer if we really wanted to.

The Ebola epidemic is the worst health emergency there has been in modern times.

We can't predict when infectios diseases will break out, but their breakout is inevitable. That is why we must be prepared.

China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.

AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.