Stella Young Quotes

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.

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.

Pity? You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!

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.

The sentiment of those suggesting the Olympics and Paralympics be combined is no doubt well intentioned. But it also echoes the myth that disabled people want to be other than what we are - that we'd like nothing more than to be 'allowed in' with the able-bodied competitors.

Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does.

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

A lot of people don't want to hire disabled actors. They think you're going to take twice as long over a shot, or they don't want have to put up a ramp for disabled access. They think, 'Why would I do that when I can just hire an able-bodied actor to play the disabled character?'

It's okay for me to make jokes about disabled people and people with horrible diseases because they make me uncomfortable, and I don't want to be like them.

When I pull my white Range Rover into disabled parking bays, the abuse that I get until I actually get out on my crutches is phenomenal, because people presume that you couldn't possibly be disabled and reverse a white Range Rover into that parking space.

Often, films about people with disabilities are from the outside looking in.

Paralympics has always had to push the media into it being about sport and not focusing on the disability.

I want to make sure that people know that I can only be myself - I can't be a spokesperson for people with disabilities, because everybody has a completely different experience. I'm glad that I'm able to inspire parents to see one way to deal with it, but at the same time, I tell a lot of dirty jokes.

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.

I'm officially disabled, but I'm truly enabled because of my lack of limbs. My unique challenges have opened up unique opportunities to reach so many in need.

I identify very proudly as a disabled woman. I identify with the crip community. I didn't invent the word 'crip'. It's a political ideology I came to in my late teens and early 20s.

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

I have a strong sense that I have to educate people about disability.

The world worries about disability more than disabled people do.

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

I know what it's like to be growing up, called 'deaf and mute' and 'deaf and dumb.' They're words that are very degrading and demeaning to people who are deaf and hard of hearing. It's almost... it's almost libelous, if you want to say that.

It became very clear to me that Yooralla was not as interested in media coverage that explored issues faced by people with disability as it was in giving a pat on the back to journalists who maintained the status quo by giving readers the warm and fuzzies over their morning paper.

Disability simulation fails to capture the nuance and complexity of living in a disabled body. And it certainly fails to give a deep understanding of systemic discrimination and abuse faced by disabled people.

Disability is often framed, in medical terms, as the ultimate disaster and certainly as a deficit.

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.