Disability History Quotes

They said 'specialist children's wards,'
But they meant children-killing centers.
They said 'final medical assistance'
But they meant murder. ~ Ann Clare LeZotte

Men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. ~ George Bernard Shaw

In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was a great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality - history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.
- The French Lieutenant's Woman ~ John Fowles

Far from being freaks, the Hell's Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked at their existence. The generation represented by the editors of Time has lived so long in a world full of Celluloid outlaws hustling toothpaste and hair oil that it is no longer capable of confronting the real thing. For twenty years they have sat with their children and watched yesterday's outlaws raise hell with yesterday's world ... and now they are bringing up children who think Jesse James is a television character. This is the generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of Life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the giddy comfort of their TV parlors, to cultivate the subtleties of American history as seen by Hollywood. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words
people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history
sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being. ~ Aldous Huxley

A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel. ~ Jose Marti

Plus I have no doubt that their garden is also where my grandparents dreamed - for a better life of equality for their grandchildren and future generations. As people rooted in their faith, they probably did a lot of praying here as well, that God would deliver us all to prosperity and peace beyond this plot of land. ~ Deborah L. Parker

I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals. ~ John Lewis Gaddis

I'm supposed to overcome my disability to make it easier to manage for people who I don't even want in my life. I have to overcome any physical sensation, any emotional burden, any independent thought. ~ Christy Leigh Stewart

Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music. ~ Greil Marcus

For four centuries now, the American people have resigned themselves to natural disasters and acts of God: floods, prairie fires, blizzards, tornados, hurricanes, dust bowls, epidemics, academics, lawyers, and politicians. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

Why do we need to be pardoned? What are we to be pardoned for? For not dying of hunger? For not accepting humbly the historic burden of disdain and abandonment? For having risen up in arms after we found all other paths closed? For not heeding the Chiapas penal code, one of the most absurd and repressive in history? For showing the rest of the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists even among the world's poorest peoples? For having made careful preparations before we began our uprising? For bringing guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For being Mexicans? For being mainly indigenous? For calling on the Mexican people to fight by whatever means possible for what belongs to them? For fighting for liberty, democracy and justice? For not following the example of previous guerrilla armies? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell ourselves out? Who should we ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Those who for many years glutted themselves at a table of plenty while we sat with death so often, we finally stopped fearing it? Those who filled our pockets and our souls with empty promises and words? Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, who died "natural" deaths of "natural causes" like measles, whooping cough, break-bone fever, cholera, typhus, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria and other lovely gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead, so very dead, so democratically dead from sorrow because no one did anything, because t ~ Subcomandante Marcos

If Fred's history will seem less unbiased then some would wish, let it never be overlooked that it is no small task to record a history of hate when one is among the hated. ~ Larry Kramer

If anyone knows a bit about history and fashion, you know it was Hugo Boss who made uniforms for the Nazis--but they looked fucking fantastic, let's face it, while they were killing people on the basis of their religion and sexuality. ~ Russell Brand

Jews were the first to believe that history itself has meaning and that progress, not repetition, is the law of life. ~ Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth

Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain. ~ Gene Tierney

[A translation into English of a poem Elisabeth wrote two weeks after her wedding]

Oh, had I but never left the path
That would have led me to freedom.
Oh, that on the broad avenues
Of vanity I had never strayed!

I have awakened in a dungeon,
With chains on my hands.
And my longing ever stronger-
And freedom! You, turned from me!

I have awakened from a rapture,
Which held my spirit captive,
And vainly do I curse this exchange,
In which I gambled away you -freedom!- away.

The Reluctant Empress, Chapter 2 ~ Brigitte Hamann

That was true, Iris would sometimes think, about marriage: it was only a boat, too. A wooden boat, difficult to build, even more difficult to maintain, whose beauty derived at least in part from its unlikelihood. Long ago the pragmatic justifications for both marriage and wooden-boat building had been lost or superseded. Why invest countless hours, years, and dollars in planing and carving, gluing and fastening, caulking and fairing, when a fiberglass boat can be had at a fraction of the cost? Why struggle to maintain love and commitment over decades when there were far easier ways to live, ones that required no effort or attention to prevent corrosion and rot? Why continue to pour your heart into these obsolete arts? Because their beauty, the way they connect you to your history and to the living world, justifies your efforts. A long marriage, like a classic wooden boat, could be a thing of grace, but only if great effort was devoted to its maintenance. At first your notions of your life with another were no more substantial than a pattern laid down in plywood. Then year by year you constructed the frame around the form, and began layering memories, griefs, and small triumphs like strips of veneer planking bent around the hull of everyday routine. You sanded down the rough edges, patched the misunderstandings, faired the petty betrayals. Sometimes you sprung a leak. You fell apart in rough weather or were smashed on devouring rocks. But then, as now, in the teeth of a storm, ~ Ayelet Waldman

I speak with the Eternal through the instrument of nature, through the world's history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo. ~ Friedrich Schiller

The word pain does too much work, you know? It's like sorry, which really shouldn't have to carry both "I sympathize" and "this is all my fault. ~ Marieke Nijkamp

The history of the Americas is one of constant warfare over salt, ~ Mark Kurlansky

The modern absolutism, which we find the most natural thing in the world, would have been quite beyond the dreams of the most absolute of kings. ~ Bertrand De Jouvenel

The battlefields where the dice of world history have been thrown can never be ordinary fields again and no god from a vanished civilization is so dead that he does not live on in his ruined temple. ~ Goran Schildt

World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years. ~ Ken Follett

The truth is not simply visible to the naked eyes, not any more. When people believe so much in media reports, history itself may conceal the truth only the chosen ones can see. ~ Aishah Madadiy

They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus's unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard. ~ Haruki Murakami

Having lived to see my senior years with eyes wide open, and possessing a keen interest in history; I have found that man's behavior in both noble and heinous ways remains unchanged by the religion he practices. ~ Michael J. Livezey

I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before. ~ Michael Collins

Each people behaves as if it had reached the end of history. ~ Nuria Amat

You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces
Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces.
History, even, does not know what is meant. ~ Richard Eberhart

Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most "obvious," "accurate," and "natural" style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored. ~ Mark Twain

We need to talk." she says.
"The four most dreaded words in the history of marriage. ~ Andrew Pyper

The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization. ~ Arthur Henderson

I've always been a history buff. It was one of the few subjects at school that really, really caught me. I think you'll find a lot of actors will be interested in history because it sparks your imagination so much. When you enter a period of history, your imagination just goes wild in creating the world, which is really what acting is. ~ Tom Mison