Bill Clinton Quotes

For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. We're not real people. We are there to inspire.

We think we know what it's all about; we think that disability is a really simple thing, and we don't expect to see disabled people in our daily lives.

The magnitude of discrimination and stigma faced by people with disability in Australia cannot be underestimated. People do not understand disability, and people fear what they don't understand.

Pity? You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!

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?'

You're not disabled unless you say 'I'm disabled.'

A week before shooting, they told me, You don't have the part, yet. We're still trying to find a handicapped kid who can act. Either that or we break your legs.

For those looking at me, meeting me for the first time, it is the body they see. I am labelled as disabled.

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

It's undeniable that what we are taught as a culture to believe about disability is at odds with traditional notions of masculinity.

I don't think of myself as being disabled, or able-bodied.

The world worries about disability more than disabled people do.

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.

For me, disability is a physical experience, but it's also a cultural experience and a social experience, and for me, the word 'crip' is the one that best encapsulated all of that.

I use the term 'disabled people' quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses.

Disability informs almost every part of my life. It's as important, if not more so, than my gender and sexuality. It's certainly a great deal more important to me than my religion or whether or not I caught a tram, ferry or bus to work.

For me, the wheelchair symbolizes disability in a way a cane does not.

I didn't know anything was wrong with me when I was growing up. I thought everyone went to occupational and speech therapy, I thought these were common things. I thought I was quite normal until I went to school and someone told me it wasn't normal to have a disability.

A lot of the time, when people meet someone in a wheelchair, or with some disability, it's the first thing they notice, but they don't know how to react.

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?

I don't generally talk about medical terms when I discuss my position as a disabled person. I take a social rather than medical approach to disability, and so long Latin names for congenital conditions are not relevant.

I was raised by a single black deaf woman, so I am as independent as they come.

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

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

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?'