Chris Burke Quotes

The Paralympic Games actually turned my whole mentality around about disability. When you're in the Paralympic athletes' village and there are 4,000 disabled people, you stop seeing disability. Totally.

I'm not an advocate for disability issues. Human issues are what interest me.

Paralympic sport and other disability sport can and should be celebrated in its own right.

We find that other employees are very enthusiastic about their fellow crew members who have disabilities-or what they previously thought of as disabilities.

Part of what Special Olympics is trying to do is break down stereotypes that still exist for people. There is still a lot of fear.

If I can be an inspiration for someone, that's fine, but just don't look down on me. Don't say, 'Oh, you're in a wheelchair.'

Blind don't mean you can't, you know, listen.

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.

I made a film about a person living with a disability. Those kinds of films are often about the disability, not who a person is.

I hope that as a professional snowboarder, Olympian, and now, a Global Ambassador for Special Olympics, I will be able to change perceptions about people with intellectual disabilities.

I am so proud of being a Paralympian because I think the Games are a very good platform for disabled persons to perform themselves. Within the Paralympics movement, it's not just talk about excellence; it's not just talk about the competition. It's also talk about the equality and how your world accepts those disabled people.

You know that the world is a better place when people can come up to a severely disabled person and say: 'Well done. You are an inspiration.'

Those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us

People with disabilities are simply part of diverse communities in the U.S.

It's not our disabilities, it's our abilities that count.

To measure the success of our societies, we should examine how well those with different abilities, including persons with autism, are integrated as full and valued members.

The British people think that if someone is disabled, then they should get all the care and support that we can offer.

I get mail from people all over the world now from people who tell me that they didn't really understand Down syndrome, but because of me they have read about it and studied it and now they know a lot more about it.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.

Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady.

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?'

Yooralla, like most disability service organisations, is full of good people who are passionate about the rights of people with disabilities.

You must make sure that the majority of the people are not marginalized.

We made history when President Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, a proud Latina, the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. And as the President likes to say, 'Every single one of them wasn't just the best Latino for the job, but the best person for the job.'

I want to show another side of Middle Easterners. My hope is that I would be able to play a variety of parts, and not always be the guy with the accent.