Edmund White Quotes

When the AIDS epidemic first started there were people who said, "Well, if there weren't gays, then we wouldn't have this problem. It's got to be because of them - let it be them instead of us." But when you educate yourself about it, you can't help but realize that we're all affected by it. I think that things like that just become too daunting for people.

HIV/AIDS is the greatest danger we have faced for many, many centuries. HIV/AIDS is worse than a war. It is like a world war. Millions of people are dying from it.

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.

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

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.

It's hard to imagine, but we cant think of HIV/AIDS as being somebody else's story. It could be any of ours.

AIDS today in Africa is claiming more lives than the sum total of all wars, famines and floods and the ravages of such deadly diseases as malaria ... We must act now for the sake of the world.

In the 1980s, when people were just beginning to talk about AIDS, there were just a few categories of those who were at high risk: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. We were the only ones identified by nationality.

It is clear before God and man that the entire war on HIV and AIDS has not been waged with any degree of piety, responsibility and care.

AIDS had landed and I was terrified. I was very scared, just as everyone was in the '80s. It was really hard to be sexually active and to sleep with men and with women and not feel you had a responsibility in terms of having safe sex.

Too many people have died so unnecessarily; AIDS is completely preventable, yet it's killing more kids in South Africa then everything else, and that's just not how it should be.

The global HIV/AIDS epidemic is an unprecedented crisis that requires an unprecedented response. In particular it requires solidarity - between the healthy and the sick, between rich and poor, and above all, between richer and poorer nations. We have 30 million orphans already. How many more do we have to get, to wake up?

We're all going to go crazy, living this epidemic [AIDS] every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as if nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it's like, what we're going through. We're living through war, but where they're living it's peacetime, and we're all in the same country.

AIDS we're - most of these diseases - we are down from the peak. We're down about 40 per cent from the peak and if we got the right vaccines, which are at the early stage of discovering, then the numbers would come down very dramatically. So that's why we talk about it as an emergency.

While we won't be able to help the 10,000 people who died in last year's [Ebola] outbreak, we can do something to save untold numbers of lives in the future if NIH is working at full strength.

We cannot proclaim this century the African Century and then ignore the AIDS pandemic, as some political leaders are apt to do. To claim this century the African Century is to declare war on AIDS.

When I first came to Washington in the 1960s, even at the height of the Vietnam War, until the end there in '68 there was a certain climate of cooperation. And then in the late sixties and in through the seventies, politics began getting more mean. And then from the eighties on it seemed to be institutionalized, this personal attack business. And I just hate it.

Martin Luther King really was a safety valve for white people. Any time it appeared that the black community was on the verge of really doing what we ought to do based on having been attacked, they put Martin Luther King on television. He was always saying, "We must use nonviolence. We must overcome hate with love." White people loved that. That's why they gave him a Nobel Prize. But when Martin Luther King started condemning the Vietnam War, that's when white people turned against him.

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.

I am so pro-swine flu... I want it. We need a plague. It's got to happen; don't be afraid. It's only going to kill the weak.

We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.

You're not born knowing how to do math. You're taught that. You're not born knowing how to hate someone. You're taught that. And so I feel I want to use my platform to raise awareness about it. To help raise something positive. In America, you look around and a lot of things that happen - it all stems from that.

It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.

My father lived with me the last five years of his life and passed away of Alzheimer's, and at that point he was saying to anyone who would listen, "We all hated the war in Vietnam." Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.

We had the 60s sexual revolution, and now people are dying of AIDS.