Disability Quotes

So I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.

When I was a child I had something called Perthes' Disease which meant I was on crutches, so I was bullied at school and all that sort of stuff.

By logic, it's a handicap. If I shut one eye, I can't see from the other eye. But it is one of those things which I don't think too much about. One needs to have the strength to move forward.

Ever since I was really little, I started doing a - I don't know how to put this - mentally challenged person on my street. I meant no harm by it, but I remembered how this person talked, and I did it for my mom, and she was not into it. She said, 'You can't do that!' But my dad really laughed.

Through good times and bad, American workers and their families have been able to rely on Social Security to provide guaranteed protection against the loss of earnings due to retirement, disability, or death.

I always say I'm one of the most normal abnormal people you'll ever meet. I get embarrassed about how many medals I've won, and I get angry when people presume that because you're gay you've got to wear pink and stilettos and camp it up, or that if you're disabled you should act like a victim and not have a life.

Pregnancy is of course confined to women, but it is in other ways significantly different from the typical covered disease or disability.

A man who has no sense of history is like a man who has no ears or no eyes.

I was hit by a car. I almost died. My show was taken away from me. I was frightened.

I can get around pretty easily. People don't expect to see me walking around.

I forged myself out of a vacuum. I crawl along the highway on hacked off stumps year after year. Some wonder how and why. I never do.

There was a golden retriever who saved countless lives on September 11 by going back in to find people. His companion was in a wheelchair. He got him out and kept going back in to save others.

I was sad because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet. So I said, "Got any shoes you’re not using?

I grew up with a special-needs brother, and the separation from other kids is so extreme. We've got to break down those barriers.

Blindness separates people from things; deafness separates people from people.

And now when our maimed soldiers have returned from the Civil War and apply for Federal office, the duties of which they are perfectly competent to discharge, they will be rejected to give places to those who were cramming themselves with facts and principles from the books, while they were bleeding for their country, because they do not know the fluctuations of the tide at the Cape of Good Hope, how near the moon ever approaches the earth, or the names of the principal rivers emptying into the Caspian Sea.

Only 44 percent of Social Security beneficiaries perceive themselves to have benefitted from a government social program.

War is not popular politically because there is always a cost—a cost in people and a cost in money.

I have done all the work myself, not assistants. That's why I'm in a wheelchair: I've been doing it physically - it's hard labour - throughout my life.

The story of FDR as U.S. Commander in Chief is a heroic war story of a president who had already overcome great adversity in facing polio but who went on to take the reins of our armed forces in the greatest conflagration in human history - on our behalf.

If I get home, I'll be so stinking rich, I'll be able to pay someone to do my hearing.

Some of the most inspiring moments in sports have come from players with physical defects. Tom Dempsey, born without toes on his right foot, kicked a 63-yard field goal in 1970, using a straighter, wider shoe.

If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.

There was a small boy on crutches. I do not know his name, and I suspect I never will. But I will never forget his face, his smile, his sorrow. He is one of the millions robbed of hope and dignity by charlatans discussed in this book. Wherever and whoever he is, I apologize to him for not having been able to protect him from such an experience. I humbly dedicate this book to him and to the many others who have suffered because the rest of us began caring too late.

People with handicaps teach me that being is more important than doing, the heart is more important than the mind, and caring together is better than caring alone.