George C. Wolfe Quotes

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 a complex situation that's sure to bring out the best and the worst in people.

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.

I remember my first friend who got sick. It was 1981, and the disease was called the gay cancer. I don't think the word 'AIDS' came out until '84. I just remember it being terrifying as more people got sick. We didn't know how you could catch it, you heard all kinds of crazy things.

AIDS is a horrible disease, and the people who catch it deserve compassion.

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.

We are fighting a deadly disease. We are not fighting the people who have that disease. Homosexuality does not produce AIDS.

The AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about.

It's pretty impossible to be a South African and not have been personally affected by HIV or AIDS.

Early in 1986, the World Health Organization in Geneva still regarded AIDS as an ailment of the promiscuous few.

HIV/AIDS has no boundaries.

You can't be involved in healthcare without being involved in the battle against AIDS.

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 actually came out the year that AIDS hit the front pages. So there was this mixed feeling about it - excitement that life's finally begun, but it was completely tied up with mortality and danger and politics.

AIDS is an absolutely tragic disease. The argument about AIDS' being some kind of divine retribution is crap.

Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived when it struck America in the 1980s.

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.

AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.

Often, city fathers blamed prostitutes for the disease, and some threatened to brand their cheeks with hot iron if they did not desist from their vices.

The pandemic of AIDS is a gender-based disease.

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

AIDS itself is subject to incredible stigma.

Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.

We need to think of chronic disease, hypertension, cancer, like H1N1. In fact, there's an epidemic of chronic disease.

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