Giles Duley Quotes

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.

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

The world worries about disability more than disabled people do.

Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.

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.

Being deaf or having any disability is not tragic. But the stereotypes about it are tragic.

Disability in the Middle East is viewed through a different lens because you're in wartime countries where it's much more mainstream, so I was just never 'other'd.

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.

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?'

We are a society that treats people with disabilities with condescension and pity, not dignity and respect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People tend to treat people with disabilities sort of like they're aliens from another planet. It doesn't come from a bad place; it comes from a place of, 'I have no idea what this disability entails, and I don't want to offend anyone or make them feel awful.'

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

The chief handicap of the blind is not blindness, but the attitude of seeing people towards them.

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 think a person who is disabled should be disabled by no act of their own. If you become disabled because of alcoholism, drugs, or things of that nature, I do not think those conditions qualify someone to be called disabled. I think those conditions result from personal decisions.

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

The Southbank Centre Unlimited Festival was a distinct moment in time, an amazing counterpoint to the London 2012 Paralympics. There is no question that a major shift in perspective is taking place, that the world is waking up and greeting - as if for the first time - the extraordinary community of people with disability.

I'm being mocked because I don't live up to a socially determined view of what other people think a person should look like.

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.

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

Try being my size and going into a public restroom.