Bernardo Bertolucci Quotes

We want to galvanize people's imaginations. With enough political will and investment, we could make wheelchairs obsolete.

It's so much easier to go to the Sony movie complex when you're disabled. You take a great elevator. You get your own little private viewing area. I love it.

I find personally that when I go to a place where I can't get in, I feel hostility from whatever it is, a hotel, a shop, a market, a street corner where there are no curb cuts, because somebody forgot to put them in, and where I have to go two blocks to the corner to do it. A lot of the excuses are, "Well, this is an old building." That's my favorite one. "This is an old building." It's as though 50 years ago, people with disabilities did not exist. As if the disabled are a new problem. It has always been a problem.

I know that there'll be a continuation of making the world more accessible for people with disabilities.

Also note that invariably when we design something that can be used by those with disabilities, we often make it better for everyone.

They told me that the hotels had maybe two rooms set up for people with disabilities, but if they got there too late, and didn't get one of these rooms, they couldn't take a shower. The room wasn't hooked up for them, or maybe the sink was too high.

From my first days in Washington D.C., where I rolled a whole four downtown blocks without seeing a single shop, cafe, bar or restaurant I could not access, to the beautifully accessible buses in New York City, I was in heaven.

What has happened to architecture since the second world war that the only passers-by who can contemplate it without pain are those equipped with a white stick and a dog?

Accessible design is good design.

In Paris they have special wheelchairs that go through every doorway. They don't change the doorways, they change the wheelchairs. To hell with the people! If someone weighs a couple more pounds, that's it!

Good design should be available to everyone - and I do mean everyone. What I spent on the wheelchair I'm in could buy a small Mercedes. It's not only unfair to me; it's unfair to someone who's indigent but has the same needs. My goal is to make all objects affordable.

My disability exists not because I use a wheelchair, but because the broader environment isn't accessible.

The cost is minimal, but one of the things that you want in a universal design is to make the plan as open as you can... and to still have walls around bedrooms and that sort of thing, and to keep the corridors wide enough so the wheelchair can do a 360 in the corridor.

In my own home, where I've been able to create an environment that works for me, I'm hardly disabled at all. I still have an impairment, and there are obviously some very restrictive things about that, but the impact of disability is less.

A lot of society tries to put people with disabilities into one cube, and when you think about it, many, many people have different types of disabilities, and you cannot put a code that applies to towards everyone - generally, they can be guidelines, but in the long run, interior designers and architects need more education on the subject.

Architects have to become more aware of exactly what is involved in designing barrier-free buildings and homes.

I firmly believe that everybody in America needs a safe place to walk or to wheelchair roll.

We need to work on creating a more inclusive music experience. I'm really so frustrated with going to festivals and there not being any closed captioning or interpreters.

Housing providers and building and design professionals have a responsibility under federal nondiscrimination laws to provide housing protections for individuals with disabilities.

Look, calling somebody in a wheelchair handicapable doesn't all of a sudden give them the power to climb stairs or the ability to grab Ho-Hos off the top shelf.

In America access is always about architecture and never about human beings. Among Israelis and Palestinians, access was rarely about anything but people. While in the U.S. a wheelchair stands out as an explicitly separate experience from the mainstream, in the Israel and Arab worlds it is just another thing that can go wrong in a place where things go wrong all the time.

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.

We fill our lives with all sorts of things that make it easier for us to get along in the world: wheelchairs, crutches, grabber sticks, hearing aids, canes, guide dogs, modified vehicles, ramps, as well as other kinds of services and supports. Disability does not necessarily mean dependence on other people.

It is nothing short of baffling to me how a city like Melbourne, where I struggle to find accessible facilities on a very regular basis, could be considered the most livable city in the world. I suppose it all depends on what makes a city 'livable' for you.

As a wheelchair user, I am utterly obsessed with toilets, and all my friends know it. A simple invitation to the pub is consistently followed by, 'Do you know if they have an accessible toilet?'