Quotes & Sayings About Aids Epidemic

China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth. — Bill Gates

Those of us who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s have a very special spot in our heart for home-based health care. — David Mixner

The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic. — Bill Gates

The AIDS epidemic, rather than being a scourge, is a welcome development in the inevitable reduction of human population ... If it didn't exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent it. — David Foreman

To me, AIDS is an international epidemic and every country can be affected by it. Therefore, it can be discussed on an international level. Unfortunately, AIDS doesn't require a visa. — Abbas Kiarostami

The AIDS disease is caused by a virus, but the AIDS epidemic is not. The AIDS epidemic is fueled by stigma, by hate, by misinformation, by ignorance, by indifference. Science has accomplished miracles over the past 20 years, and science can now end this disease - but it cannot end the epidemic. We need more than medicine. We can do something about these things. We need to speak out about the changes we need to make in our society. — Elton John

Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking isn't cool. But that's not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. Smoking epidemics begin in precisely the same way that the suicide epidemic in Micronesia began or word-of-mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic began, because of the extraordinary influence of Pam P. and Billy G. and Maggie and their equivalents-the smoking versions of R. and Tom Gau and Gaetan Dugas. In this epidemic, as in all others, a very small group-a select few-are responsible for driving the epidemic forward. — Malcolm Gladwell

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

History will not judge HIV/AIDS kindly ... the harshest words will be reserved for how the world responded, or rather failed to respond, to the epidemic. — Seth Berkley

We're the end of the baby boomers, and we participated in many social changes. Who would of thought, for example, when the AIDS epidemic came along that so many would die, because it was gay people dying. And what emerged was a grassroots movement that developed, and succeeded in getting things done. The pinpointing of that movement evolved into the changes that we have today. — Todd Haynes

What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease [AIDS] had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. — David Levithan

The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War. — Edmund White

We must work to repeal trade agreements that impede access to affordable generic drugs. We must work to cause the IMF and the World Bank to reduce and eventually eliminate the debt that takes poor nations' resources away from crises like AIDS. We must focus America's leadership on addressing and ending this epidemic. — Dennis Kucinich

The reality is that the AIDS epidemic continues to outstrip the global and national efforts to contain it. — Peter Piot

Abstinence, being faithful and correct and consistent condom use are the only ways to successfully reach everyone when discussing HIV prevention. I believe that the abstinence message alone does not solve the AIDS epidemic. — Ashley Judd

I was coming to be an adult, the AIDS epidemic happened. Moving to New York, watching that unfold, and watching the activism around that ... it was complete chaos of life, and then this horrific non-response from the powers that be. There was a lot of misery and sadness tied up in that. — Kelly Reichardt

There's a huge AIDS epidemic in Africa, and one of Bad Boy's plans this year is to give more awareness to that. We're gonna be doing a big charity concert helping to save some of the brothers and sisters in Africa. — Sean Combs

Though we don't have a cure for cancer we at least have stopped being too ashamed to even say the name of the disease - and the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic is edifying, isn't it? Shame shuts down productive thinking, and I'd like to open the doors. It's a first step. — Laura Mullen

Drug warriors' staunch opposition to needle exchanges to prevent the spread of HIV in addicts delayed the programs' widespread introduction in most states for years. A federal ban on funding for these programs wasn't lifted until 2009. Contrast this with what happened in the U.K. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1990s, the HIV infection rate in IV drug users in the U.K. was about 1%. In New York City, the American epicenter, that figure was 50%. The British had introduced widespread needle exchange in 1986. That country had no heterosexual AIDS epidemic. — Maia Szalavitz

How we deal with the AIDS epidemic should be one of the greatest ways that the world gets measured. The report card for this era. — Bill Gates

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. — Larry Kramer

As a nation we should commit ourselves not only to the fight against terrorism, but to economic justice, defeat of the AIDS epidemic and vestiges of discriminatory policies of all kinds. — Charles B. Rangel

Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time. — Stephen Richards

Faith can be stirred within the walls of church buildings, but faith is formed and nourished in the waiting rooms of hospitals, helplessly witnessing a thirty-one-year-old sister suffer, holding kids affected by the AIDS epidemic, and being stretched outside of our own social makeup. — Josh Ross

When I first came up, the whole AIDS epidemic was starting, and the gay community that I experienced from the beginning of my career was mostly - and overwhelmingly - concerned with staying alive. And, also, I felt really aware of the preciousness of life and time. The gay community and people who were HIV-positive were treated so badly, and I was very disturbed by things. But I also saw a lot of love and connection in the gay community at that time. — Madonna Ciccone

I came to N.Y.C. in 1988 and got very involved with Act Up. I also started making movies, including two very gay shorts, 'Vaudeville' and 'Lady.' It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and New York City was both dying and very alive at the same time. — Ira Sachs

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? — Kofi Annan

Why target two and a half million innocent newborns and children?" Barbara Loe Fisher asks of the hep B vaccine. The implication behind the word innocent is that only those who are not innocent need protection from disease. All of us who grew up during the AIDS epidemic were exposed to the idea that AIDS was a punishment for homosexuality, promiscuity, and addiction. But if disease is a punishment for anything, it is only a punishment for being alive. When I was a child, I asked my father what causes cancer and he paused for a long moment before saying, "Life. Life causes cancer." I took this as an artful dodge until I read Siddhartha Mukherjee's history of cancer, in which he argues not only that life causes cancer but that cancer is us. "Down to their innate molecular core," Mukherjee writes, "cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves." And this, he notes, "is not a metaphor. — Eula Biss

Most importantly, the epidemic was only news when it was not killing homosexuals. In this sense, AIDS remained a fundamentally gay disease, newsworthy only by the virtue of the fact that it sometimes hit people who weren't gay, — Randy Shilts

On the The AIDS Epidemic: This is a war. It has killed more people than has been the case in all previous wars and in all previous natural disasters ... We must not continue to be debating, to be arguing, when people are dying. — Nelson Mandela

My work with AIDS patients started right at the beginning of the epidemic, totally unplanned and spontaneous, as all my work had proceeded in the previous two decades, if it were not already my whole life-style! In the early eighties, we knew very little about this peculiar disease. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

When the AIDS epidemic broke, because I happened to be a science nerd and knew a lot about viruses and a lot about that virus at the time, I felt a moral obligation to go out and try to stem the fear and get out and explain to people what the disease was and how it worked. — Morgan Fairchild

The same philantropists who give millions for AIDS or education in tolerance have ruined the lives of thousands through financial speculation and thus created the conditions for the rise of the very intolerance that is being fought. In the 1960s and '70s it was possible to buy soft-porn postcards of a girl clad in a bikini or wearing an evening gown; however, when one moved the postcard a little bit or looked at it from a slightly different perspective, her clothes magically disappeared to reveal the girl's naked body. When we are bombarded by the heartwarming news of a debt cancellation or a big humanitarian campaign to eradicate a dangerous epidemic, just move the postcard a little to catch a glimpse of the obscene figure of the liberal communist at work beneath. — Slavoj Zizek

HIV/AIDS has been a big epidemic for my generation, it's been around for as long as I've been alive. — Rihanna

I have covered wars, before the epidemic began and since. They are all ugly and painful and unjust, but for me, nothing has matched the dread I felt while walking through the Castro, the Village, or Dupont Circle at the height of the AIDS epidemic. — Michael Specter

I think racism is a bottom-line AIDS issue. And I think homophobia is a bottom-line AIDS issue, and sexism and class issues and all of this. I think that we are not going to solve the AIDS epidemic unless we deal with these issues, and vice versa. — Ann Northrop

Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases. — Dennis Altman

Cervantes told me history is the mother of truth.
Borges told me historical truth is not what took place; it is what we think took place.
So Billy Shakespeare was queer.
Ronnie was the greatest president in history, right up there on Mount Rushmore.
AIDS is mankind's greatest plague.
Israel only kills terrorists.
America never bombed Lebanon.
Jesus was straight. Juda and he were just friends.
Roseanne's parents molested her as an infant.
Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat deserved their Nobels.
And Gaetan Dugas started the AIDS epidemic. — Rabih Alameddine