Jean O'Leary Quotes

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

AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.

HIV/AIDS has no boundaries.

Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this.

We need to think of chronic disease, hypertension, cancer, like H1N1. In fact, there's an epidemic of chronic disease.

We didn't exist. Ronald Reagan didn't say the word 'AIDS' until 1987. I've tried desperately to get a meeting in the White House; Gay Men's Health Crisis is already an established organization. I have a certain presence.

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.

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

Heart disease continues to be the number one killer; cancer, the number 2 killer, not far behind. The tragic aspect of these deadly diseases is that they could all be cured, I do believe, if we had sufficient funding.

I think if we can prevent a fatal disease, we should.

I started to write about science and medicine at the 'Washington Post,' in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

In Africa through the 1990s, with notable exceptions in Senegal and Uganda, nearly all the ruling powers denied they had a problem with AIDS.

I remember my first friend who got sick. It was 1981, and the disease was called the gay cancer. I don't think the word 'AIDS' came out until '84. I just remember it being terrifying as more people got sick. We didn't know how you could catch it, you heard all kinds of crazy things.

AIDS is the biggest challenge, the major disaster facing this country and we would have wished for something more specific and far-reaching.

One out of every 100 American men is HIV positive. The rate of infection has reached epidemic proportions in 40 developing nations.

America's most dangerous diseases have developed an immunity to politics. We suffer not from a failure of political organization or power, but a failure of love.

The trouble is it's very difficult to pin-point the most important thing because Aids affects everyone in different levels of society, differently and you have to respond to it differently.

As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.

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

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

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.

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

We can't predict when infectios diseases will break out, but their breakout is inevitable. That is why we must be prepared.

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

Watching AIDS play its evil game of give and take has made me understand why lobbying for increased research funding should be an urgent priority - not only for the gay community but for us all.