Ellen Barkin Quotes

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

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

Because of the lack of education on AIDS, discrimination, fear, panic, and lies surrounded me.

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

The spread of the disease is under control. What I worry about is the spread of fear of the disease is not under control.

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 a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.

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

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

My mom's brother was gay, and he actually passed away from AIDS when I was 13. He was quite a character, but he also worked at the electrical plant, so he was this complicated guy with a big laugh who would wear a trucker hat and do impressions. He was gay, but to me, Uncle Alan was just the funniest person in the world.

HIV does not make people dangerous to be with. So you can shake their hands and give them a hug. Heaven knows they need it.

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.

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

'Longtime Companion' was really the first movie that I know of that addressed the problem of AIDS. This was back in the '80s that we did this.

Fear and ignorance fuel so much homophobia.

I would be so scared if I was a gay guy...you'll, like, die of AIDS.

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.

That the AIDS pandemic is threatening sustainable development in Africa only reinforces the reality that health is at the center of sustainable development.

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

The fashion industry is often charged with having kept its blinders on as one Seventh Avenue company after another lost employees to AIDS. Consumers, it was feared, would shun the racks of designers whose names were associated with the disease. And to stand up against AIDS would, in many minds, confirm the business's stereotypical image.

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.

The message has become clearer to the nation about AIDS. People used to think they could catch it all kinds of ways, but we now know that it is absolutely passed through bodily fluids.

There exist thousands of Americans who have AIDS-defining diseases but are HIV negative.

For gay people, we learned about our lives in secrecy and a lot of fear.