Awareness Quotes

"The world worries about disability more than disabled people do."

- Warwick Davis

"I can see the humorous side of things and enjoy the fun when it comes; but look where I will, there seems to me always more sadness than joy in life."

- Jerome K. Jerome

"The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it."

- Edmond de Goncourt

"Every human walks around with a certain kind of sadness. They may not wear it on their sleeves, but it's there if you look deep."

- Taraji P. Henson

"If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it."

- Zora Neale Hurston

"Unbeing dead isn't being alive."

- E. E. Cummings

"When you hear the word ‘disabled,’ people immediately think about people who can’t walk or talk or do everything that people take for granted. Now, I take nothing for granted. But I find the real disability is people who can’t find joy in life and are bitter."

- Teri Garr

"I was slightly brain damaged at birth, and I want people like me to see that they shouldn’t let a disability get in the way. I want to raise awareness – I want to turn my disability into ability."

- Susan Boyle

"Abled does not mean enabled. Disabled does not mean less abled."

- Khang Kijarro Nguyen

"It is so important to showcase people with disabilities with intersectional identities because that allows viewers to see beyond disability….People with disabilities are multilayered—we are complex breathing human beings defined by more than just what we lack."

- Lauren Ridloff

"The world worries about disability more than disabled people do"

- Warwick Davis

"The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. … The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes."

- G. K. Chesterton

"The prospects for stable democracy in a country are improved if its citizens and leaders strongly support democratic, ideas, values, and practices. The most reliable support comes when these beliefs and predispositions are embedded in the country's culture and are transmitted, in large part, for one generation to the next. In other words, the country possesses a democratic political culture."

- Robert Dahl

"To consider the Supreme Court of the United States strictly as a legal institution is to underestimate its significance in the American political system. For it is also a political institution, an institution, that is to say, for arriving at decisions on controversial questions of national policy. As a political institution, the court is highly unusual, not least because Americans are not quite willing to accept the fact that it is a political institution and not quite capable of denying it; so that frequently we take both positions at once. This is confusing to foreigners, amusing to logicians, and rewarding to ordinary Americans who thus manage to retain the best of both worlds."

- Robert Dahl

"Compared with the political systems of other advanced democratic countries, ours is among the most opaque, complex, confusing, and difficult to understand."

- Robert Dahl

"The world has a fast-growing problematic disability, which forges bonds in families, causes people to communicate in direct and clear ways, cuts down meaningless social interaction, pushes people to the limit with learning about themselves, whilst making them work together to make a better world. It’s called Autism – and I can’t see anything wrong with it, can you? Boy I’m glad I also have this disability!"

- Patrick Jasper Lee

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who, have a right …and a desire to know"

- John Adams

"The freedom to express varying and often opposing ideas is essential to variety of conceptions of democracy. If democracy is viewed as essentially a process – a way in which collective decisions for a society are made – free expression is crucial to the openness of the process and to such characteristics as elections, representation of interests, and the like."

- Jonathan D. Casper

"If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded."

- Karl Marx

"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian."

- Robert Orben

"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on."

- William S. Burroughs

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

- Isaac Asimov

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy."

- Ernest Benn

"In politics, stupidity is not a handicap."

- Napoleon Bonaparte

"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them."

- Karl Marx

"There is in the American Government … a want of unity. … The Sailors, the helmsman, the engineer, do not seem to have one purpose or obey one will so that instead of making steady way, the vessel may pursue a devious or zigzag course, and sometimes merely turn round and round in the water."

- James Bryce

"The presence of a single bird can change everything for one who appreciates them."

- Julie Zickefoose

"The rising of birds in their flight is the sign of an ambuscade. Startled beasts indicate that a sudden attack is coming."

- Sun Tzu

"On a day like this, I can’t imagine anything better that might happen in a person’s life than for them to start paying attention to birds—to become aware of this magical world that exists all around us, unnoticed by many but totally captivating for those who know its secrets."

- Ken Kaufman

"Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?"

- David Attenborough