Handicapped People Quotes & Sayings

Few nations do more than the United States to assist their least fortunate citizens-to make certain that no child, no elderly or handicapped citizen, no family in any circumstances in any State, is left without the essential needs for a decent and healthy existence. In too few nations, I might add, are the people aware of the progressive strides this country has taken in demonstrating the humanitarian side of freedom. Our record is a proud one-and it sharply refutes those who accuse us of thinking only in the materialistic terms of cash registers and calculating machines. — John F. Kennedy

Speaking of these attitudes turned Temple's mind to a parallel: "I find a very high correlation," she said, "between the way animals are treated and the handicapped. ... Georgia is a snake pit - they treat [handicapped people] worse than animals. ... Capital-punishment states are the worst animal states and the worst for the handicapped. — Oliver Sacks

The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone.
So if there is a message I have to give, it is that if I've found one overriding thing about my personal election, it's the fact that if a gay person can be elected, it's a green light. And you and you and you, you have to give people hope ... — Harvey Milk

You know how Burger King often employs mentally handicapped people to wipe down tables at their restaurants? What those people are to Burger King, paralegals are to lawyers. It's the lowest job you can possibly get and still technically be considered in the legal profession — Michael Ian Black

Maybe the truly handicapped people are the ones that don't need God as much. — Joni Eareckson Tada

There were always blind, deaf, or handicapped people hanging around the brothers, and I figured it was evidence that they either had a soft, compassionate side or were running some kind of mysterious scam. — Mick Mars

Many ills of the Christian life are due to handicapped beginnings. Too many people are preaching a warped or truncated gospel, and spiritual birth defects are the inevitable result. — J. Edwin Orr

Just then, in that instant, I saw His eyes. I recognised them. They were the eyes of that trembling father in a smoke-filled room on the ninety-third floor of Tower One, dialing his little girls for the last time. Those were the eyes behind that calming voice singing 'Amazing Grace' in a crowded and slippery stairwell, trapped outside a roof door when the ceilings began to cave. The eyes of the people who stayed behind with the handicapped victims waiting for police officers who never made it up the stairs. Those were the eyes of firemen who pushed me to safety, the doctor who cared for me for more than a year free of charge, the therapist who visited my home regularly so that I could sleep a little, the children who loved me, the brother who prayed nonstop, and the pastor who became my friend. Those were the eyes of God. — Leslie Haskin

To grow up in the neighborhood of handicapped people was an important experience for me. I learned back then to treat them in a very normal way. — Angela Merkel

I remember seeing a Nazi poster," she went on. It was this memory that had triggered her dreadful thought. "There was a picture of a male nurse and a mentally handicapped man. The text said something like: 'Sixty thousand reichsmarks is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the people's community during his lifetime. Comrade, that is your money too!' It was an advertisement for a magazine, I think. — Ken Follett

Sometimes I park in handicap spaces while handicapped people make handicapped faces. — Denis Leary

Before I was known, I would go on stage and pretend I was other people. Once I pretended I was mentally handicapped. It was really wrong. One time I was a bad magician. And one time I pretended I was a Christian comic. — Andy Dick

Do people actually do that
go back and thank their teachers years later, when they're no longer handicapped by youth and ignorance, when they figure out just how much their teachers actually did for them? — Matthew Quick

I understand I'm supposed to be feminine and dainty, but I'm not. There are two sides to the coin. People are more impressed with things that I do because they almost treat you as if you're handicapped if you're a woman ... people can be impressed that I can play a few chords on the guitar. — Kesha

We aren't handicapped in any way except by what other people think. Focus on people's abilities. I can't be on 'American Idol,' but there's all kinds of stuff I can do. — Marlee Matlin

Its job was to arrange the painless deaths of handicapped people who could not survive without costly care. It had done splendid work in the last couple of years, disposing of tens of thousands of useless people. The problem was that German public opinion was not yet sophisticated enough to understand the need for such deaths, so the program had to be kept quiet. — Ken Follett

Some white people are so accustomed to operating at a competitive advantage that when the playing field is level, they feel handicapped. — Nathan McCall

obliteration of the Negro home. A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Outside of school, though, we were often defined by our disabilities. We were "handicapped" - a bit like a species. Often when people have a disability, it's the disability that other people see rather than all the other abilities that coexist with their particular difficulty. It's why we talk about people being "disabled" rather than "having a disability." One of the reasons that people are branded by their disability is that the dominant conception of ability is so narrow. But the limitations of this conception affect everyone in education, not just those with "special needs." These days, anyone whose real strengths lie outside the restricted field of academic work can find being at school a dispiriting experience and emerge from it wondering if they have any significant aptitudes at all. — Ken Robinson

My interest is to point out to you that you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really handicapped, I wouldn't advise you to do any such thing. But you are made to feel by other people that you are handicapped so that they could sell you those crutches. Throw them away and you can walk. That's all that I can say. 'If I fall....' - that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going to fall. — U.G. Krishnamurti

Smart people in rural areas, the handicapped, people looking for companionship, they love it. But you have to be highly motivated to get on and learn to use it. — Philip Rosedale

They see me wheeling around in a beautiful gown, and they realize you can look elegant, and you can lead a happy life in a wheelchair. I know I've helped handicapped people, because I've received many comments. — Anna Lee

People with developmental disabilities and mental illness are only handicapped by how much we underestimate them. — Donna Kirk

As you walk, hop, hobble, or wheel
Meeting people of different kinds,
Remember that being handicapped
Is only a state of mind — Stephen Cosgrove

It's not that the Davenports had never had black people around their house before, or even a Chinese guy once, but never a Malaysian who looked Chinese to some and Indian to others, fancied himself black at times, and wanted to be the next Lenny Bruce Lee; a preppy black football player who sounded like the president and read Plato in Latin; and a white woman who occasionally claimed to be Native American. They were like an overconstructed novel, each representative of some cul-de-sac of idiolect and stereotype, missing only a handicapped person - No! At Berkeley we say handi-capable person - and a Jew and a Hispanic, and an Asian not of the subcontinent, Louis always said. — T. Geronimo Johnson

As long as there are poor people in the world, as long as there are people who are deprived and handicapped in the world, if we are sensitive, we will not load ourselves with unnecessary adornment. — Eknath Easwaran

Beyond that, states had to also have electronic voting machines that made it possible for people who are physically handicapped to vote in private ... and the computerized voting machine made it very easy for, particularly, the blind. — DeForest Soaries

Mimetic theory explains the presence of disabilities and infirmities in a great many mythical stories. When there is no ground for making a victim of someone - because he isn't guilty of anything - people act as children do and make a scapegoat of someone who is physically unattractive, or who is an outsider. The number of outsiders in myths is quite extraordinary. And why are so many victims lame? My work is scientific because it tries to solve the puzzle constituted by these clues, to explain why outsiders, many of them handicapped, are made into victims and forcibly expelled from a community. The burden falls on anyone who doubts my theory to supply a better explanation, or else to adopt mine for want of a more satisfactory one. — Rene Girard

The man behind the counter seemed to have stopped listening to him. He slid a room key across the fake-wood-grain counter and returned to his scribbled lorem ipsums. Neethan could have gone on for hours with this guy, chatting him up about music made by mentally handicapped people and the myriad challenges of international aid organizations, but this was a person programmed to hand out room keys and swipe credit cards and engage in only the amount of conversation needed to keep such transactions rolling along smoothly. If that meant asking about a guest's gigantic celestial head, then that's just what good customer service was all about. — Ryan Boudinot

I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the game, like queer theory. — Leslie Fiedler

Ever since I was quite young, I was in St. John's Ambulance or the Red Cross; latterly, I've been involved in voluntary work with the mentally handicapped and Abbeyfield Old People's Homes. — Nicholas Winton

We are all inspired by the incredible stories of handicapped people who write novels with their toes, cancer victims who run marathons for cancer research, bereaved parents who set up memorial funds for their lost children. How much easier is it for most of us to be small heroes simply by taking responsibility for our daily lives and transcending our ordinary obstacles? — Danah Zohar

I have discovered that most people who tell me that they cannot forgive a person who wronged them are handicapped by a mistaken understanding of what forgiving is. — Lewis B. Smedes

Parents do overindulge their children, giving them a profusion of material things ... without the stabilizing effects of earning one's way, of making decisions, of sweating hard to attain some kind of goal, young people are grievously handicapped. — Billy Graham