Disability Positive Quotes

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The worst disability in life is a bad attitude.
SupaNova Slom
Theres a remarkable amount of strength residing in those who move forward without being able to physically move. Ones that carry the weight of illness or a disability, they battle wars most know nothing about. They are the true warriors of the world, the ones who have every reason to quit but never do.
Nikki Rowe
In life, the question is not if you will have problems, but how you are going to deal with your problems. If the possibility of failure were erased, what would you attempt to achieve? The essence of man is imperfection. Know that you're going to make mistakes. The fellow who never makes a mistake takes his orders from one who does. Wake up and realize this: Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success. Achievers are given multiple reasons to believe they are failures. But in spite of that, they persevere. The average for entrepreneurs is 3.8 failures before they finally make it in business. When achievers fail, they see it as a momentary event, not a lifelong epidemic. Procrastination is too high a price to pay for fear of failure. To conquer fear, you have to feel the fear and take action anyway. Forget motivation. Just do it. Act your way into feeling, not wait for positive emotions to carry you forward. Recognize that you will spend much of your life making mistakes. If you can take action and keep making mistakes, you gain experience. Life is playing a poor hand well. The greatest battle you wage against failure occurs on the inside, not the outside. Why worry about things you can't control when you can keep yourself busy controlling the things that depend on you? Handicaps can only disable us if we let them. If you are continually experiencing trouble or facing obstacles, then you should check to make sure that you are not the problem. Be more concerned with what you can give rather than what you can get because giving truly is the highest level of living. Embrace adversity and make failure a regular part of your life. If you're not failing, you're probably not really moving forward. Everything in life brings risk. It's true that you risk failure if you try something bold because you might miss it. But you also risk failure if you stand still and don't try anything new. The less you venture out, the greater your risk of failure. Ironically the more you risk failure — and actually fail — the greater your chances of success. If you are succeeding in everything you do, then you're probably not pushing yourself hard enough. And that means you're not taking enough risks. You risk because you have something of value you want to achieve. The more you do, the more you fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better you get. Determining what went wrong in a situation has value. But taking that analysis another step and figuring out how to use it to your benefit is the real difference maker when it comes to failing forward. Don't let your learning lead to knowledge; let your learning lead to action. The last time you failed, did you stop trying because you failed, or did you fail because you stopped trying? Commitment makes you capable of failing forward until you reach your goals. Cutting corners is really a sign of impatience and poor self-discipline. Successful people have learned to do what does not come naturally. Nothing worth achieving comes easily. The only way to fail forward and achieve your dreams is to cultivate tenacity and persistence. Never say die. Never be satisfied. Be stubborn. Be persistent. Integrity is a must. Anything worth having is worth striving for with all your might. If we look long enough for what we want in life we are almost sure to find it. Success is in the journey, the continual process. And no matter how hard you work, you will not create the perfect plan or execute it without error. You will never get to the point that you no longer make mistakes, that you no longer fail. The next time you find yourself envying what successful people have achieved, recognize that they have probably gone through many negative experiences that you cannot see on the surface. Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.
John C. Maxwell (Failing Forward)
In evaluating ourselves, we tend to be long on our weaknesses and short on our strengths.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In my work, I’ve noticed that people with invisible illnesses or disabilities are scared of acting too positive because then people won’t believe that they’re sick. They’re afraid of being too negative because then they aren’t being strong or fighting hard enough. They can’t win.
Whitney Goodman (Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy)
Government regulations required that an elevator be installed for the use of the disabled. Mother would not allow an elevator. The city offered to pay for the elevator. Its offer was refused. After all the negotiations and plans, the project for the poor was abandoned because an elevator for the handicapped was unacceptable.
Christopher Hitchens (The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice)
You really don't have to subscribe to the life that had been written for you.
Allan Hennessy
With determination, it is possible to block out the negative things and enjoy the positive ones, despite the cons. Most importantly, it is possible to dance through everything pernicious.
Sarah Todd Hammer (Determination (5k, Ballet, #2))
If you are disabled, it is probably not your fault, but it is no good blaming the world or expecting it to take pity on you. One has to have a positive attitude and must make the best of the situation that one finds oneself in; if one is physically disabled, one cannot afford to be psychologically disabled as well. In my opinion, one should concentrate on activities in which one's physical disability will not present a serious handicap. I am afraid that Olympic Games for the disabled do not appeal to me, but it is easy for me to say that because I never liked athletics anyway. On the other hand, science is a very good area for disabled people because it goes on mainly in the mind. Of course, most kinds of experimental work are probably ruled out for most such people, but theoretical work is almost ideal. My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in. I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can.
Stephen Hawking
The most mind-blowing results concern the aging process. People with a more positive attitude to their later years are less likely to develop hearing loss, frailty, and illness—and even Alzheimer’s disease—than people who associate aging with senility and disability. In a very real sense, we are as young as we feel inside.
David Robson (The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World)
I feel a little bitter that most non-disabled people do not have this dilemma of whether they will exchange their privacy to be seen as human. I am also aware that I am not alone in this experience, and that many marginalized people are put in the position of having to prove their humanity every day.
Alice Wong (Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People)
For some men, a wild, aggressive masculinity has always been untenable. One man with a physical disability recalls feeling that there was no place for him in the evangelicalism of the 2000s. If you weren’t “a sports or hunting fanatic in an evangelical church,” your position was marginal, as he put it. Another man, too, recounted that those who weren’t particularly athletic, who weren’t looking to “jump across ravines and climb rock walls” could feel like inauthentic men and second-class Christians.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation)
Be patient. Changes that alter the structure of power and widen opportunity require years of hard work, as those who toiled for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, or have been working for the rights of the disabled and gays, would tell you. It took thirty years of continuous fulmination for women to get the right to vote; fifty years of agitation before employers were required to bargain with unionized workers. Those who benefit from the prevailing allocation of power and wealth don’t give up their privileged positions without a fight, and they usually have more resources at their disposal than the insurgents. Take satisfaction from small victories, but don’t be discouraged or fall into cynicism. And don’t allow yourself to burn out. I
Robert B. Reich (Beyond Outrage: What has gone wrong with our economy and our democracy, and how to fix them)
My name is CRPS, or so they say But I actually go by; a few different names. I was once called causalgia, nearly 150 years ago And then I had a new name It was RSD, apparently so. I went by that name because the burn lived inside of me. Now I am called CRPS, because I have so much to say I struggle to be free. I don't have one symptom and this is where I change, I attack the home of where I live; with shooting/burning pains. Depression fills the mind of the body I belong, it starts to speak harsh to self, negativity growing strong. Then I start to annoy them; with the issues with sensitivity, You'd think the pain enough; but no, it wants to make you aware of its trembling disability. I silently make my move; but the screams are loud and clear, Because I enter your physical reality and you can't disappear. I confuse your thoughts; I contain apart of your memory, I cover your perspective, the fog makes it sometimes unbearable to see. I play with your temperature levels, I make you nervous all the time - I take away your independance and take away your pride. I stay with you by the day & I remind you by the night, I am an awful journey and you will struggle with this fight. Then there's a side to me; not many understand, I have the ability to heal and you can be my friend. Help yourself find the strength to fight me with all you have, because eventually I'll get tired of making you grow mad. It will take some time; remember I mainly live inside your brain, Curing me is hard work but I promise you, You can beat me if you feed love to my pain. Find the strength to carry on and feed the fears with light; hold on to the seat because, like I said, it's going to be a fight. But I hope to meet you, when your healthy and healed, & you will silenty say to me - I did this, I am cured is this real? That day could possibly come; closer than I want- After all I am a disease and im fighting for my spot. I won't deny from my medical angle, I am close to losing the " incurable " battle.
Nikki Rowe
It is difficult to exaggerate the adverse influence of the precepts and practices of religion upon the status and happiness of woman. Owing to the fact that upon women devolves the burden of motherhood, with all its accompanying disabilities, they always have been, and always must be, at a natural disadvantage in the struggle of life as compared with men.... With certain exceptions, women all the world over have been relegated to a position of inferiority in the community, greater or less according to the religion and the social organisation of the people; the more religious the people the lower the status of the women...
Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner
If you have never did a mistake, then death is impossibe, but then, death is a possible mistake.
Michael Bassey Johnson
Don't let your past pollute your present and disable you from progressing in the future.
Maddy Malhotra (How to Build Self-Esteem and Be Confident: Overcome Fears, Break Habits, Be Successful and Happy)
Presenting the cyborg/disability connection in a purely positive light also ignores the fact that, for many people, adaptive technologies can be painful;
Alison Kafer (Feminist, Queer, Crip)
Artificiality is the reality of the mind. Mind has never been and will never have a given nature. It becomes mind by positing itself as the artefact of its own concept. By realizing itself as the artefact of its own concept, it becomes able to transform itself according to its own necessary concept by first identifying, and then replacing or modifying, its conditions of realization, disabling and enabling constraints. Mind is the craft of applying itself to itself. The history of the mind is therefore quite starkly the history of artificialization. Anyone and anything caught up in this history is predisposed to thoroughgoing reconstitution. Every ineffable will be theoretically disenchanted and every scared will be practically desanctified.
Reza Negarestani (Intelligence and Spirit)
Almost every Autistic person I spoke to has found that in order to build a life that suits them, they’ve had to learn to let certain unfair expectations go, and withdraw from activities that don’t matter to them. It’s scary to allow ourselves to disappoint other people, but it can be radical and liberating, too. Admitting what we can’t do means confronting the fact we have a disability, and therefore we occupy a marginalized position in society—but it also is an essential part of finally figuring out what assistance we need, and which ways of living are best for us.
Devon Price (Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity)
Even as I worried, I admired her strength and unwillingness to give in to the virus in her blood. "I'm fighting to show that I can still succeed," she told me once. "An HIV-positive person is not a disable person. I still have my dreams.
Nicole Itano
When weight loss is conflated with veganism, it falls into dangerous area of body shaming and misogyny. Mainstream media loves to make women feel inferior when it comes to their bodies and unfortunately veganism has recently become another weapon and this sexist war on our society. Thin white women are used to sell veganism as a quick fix to a more desirable body at the expense of anyone who doesn't fit the cookie cutter idea of female perfection. In addition, these images and messages work to oppress women of colour and people living with disabilities. Selling veganism as anything other than caring for animals often leads to oppression, plain and simple. We need to resist this approach to promoting veganism by drawing the fight back to animals. Every single time.
Sean O'Callaghan (Fat, Gay Vegan - Eat, Drink and Live Like You Give a Sh!t)
If we think of alcohol, for instance, as disabling negative barriers to cooperation (lying, suspicion, cheating), we have to also see its positive role in building affiliative, pair bond–like emotional ties between members of the group through the stimulation of endorphins and serotonin.
Edward Slingerland (Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization)
Do you ever feel like you have been stopped dead in your tracks? That you have fallen and can’t get up? Or like you are stuck in a rut or wading in muck? Paralysis, inertia, and being stuck, can be disempowering and disabling. What is it going to take for you to restart your engines and get moving again?
Susan C. Young
There's no hope for these boys and girls, the headmaster soberly explained in the interview. This is not education, this is storage. Maybe Sonja (disabled) understood how it felt to be described as such. The vacant position only attracted one applicant, and she go thtose boys and girls to read Shakespeare.
Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
learning in adulthood that you have been secretly nursing a disability all your life is quite the world-shattering experience. Adjusting your self-concept is a long process. It can involve mourning, rage, embarrassment, and dozens upon dozens of “wait, that was an Autism thing?” revelations. Though many of us come to see Autistic identity as a net positive in our lives, accepting our limitations is an equally important part of the journey. The clearer we are with ourselves about where we excel and where we need help, the more likely we are to eke out an existence that’s richly interdependent, sustainable, and meaningful.
Devon Price (Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity)
In study after study I conducted, I found that older people with more-positive perceptions of aging performed better physically and cognitively than those with more-negative perceptions; they were more likely to recover from severe disability, they remembered better, they walked faster, and they even lived longer.
Becca Levy (Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live)
In Loree’s care collective, her need for access is posited as something she both needs and deserves, and as a chance to build community, hang out with Loree, and have fun—not as a chore. This is drastically different from most ways care is thought of in the world, as an isolated, begrudgingly done task that is never a site of pleasure, joy, or community building.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice)
According to Jay Belsky, a leading proponent of this view and a psychology professor and child care expert at the University of London, the reactivity of these kids’ nervous systems makes them quickly overwhelmed by childhood adversity, but also able to benefit from a nurturing environment more than other children do. In other words, orchid children are more strongly affected by all experience, both positive and negative. Scientists have known for a while that high-reactive temperaments come with risk factors. These kids are especially vulnerable to challenges like marital tension, a parent’s death, or abuse. They’re more likely than their peers to react to these events with depression, anxiety, and shyness. Indeed, about a quarter of Kagan’s high-reactive kids suffer from some degree of the condition known as “social anxiety disorder,” a chronic and disabling form of shyness.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
Gerontologists studying the aging process find increasing evidence that most of us will age with a fair degree of success. There’s far less institutionalization and disability than one might have guessed. While the size of social networks shrink with age, the quality of the relationships improves. There are types of cognitive skills that improve in old age (these are related to social intelligence and to making good strategic use of facts, rather than merely remembering them easily). The average elderly individual thinks his or her health is above average, and takes pleasure from that. And most important, the average level of happiness increases in old age; fewer negative emotions occur and, when they do, they don’t persist as long. Connected to this, brain-imaging studies show that negative images have less of an impact, and positive images have more of an impact on brain metabolism in older people, as compared to young.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping)
Grazer and Cohn - two outsiders with learning disabilities-played a trick. They bluffed their way into professions that would have been closed to them. The man in the cab assumed that no one would be so audacious as to say he knew how to trade options if he didn't. And it never occurred to the people Brian Grazer called that when he said he was Brian Grazer from Warner Brothers, what he meant was that he was Brian Grazer who pushed the mail cart around at Warner Brothers. What they did is not "right," just as it is not "right" to send children against police dogs. But we need to remember that our definition of what right is, often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside. David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others. That's how people with brains a little bit different from the rest of ours get jobs as options traders and Hollywood producers-and a small band of protesters armed with nothing but their wits have a chance against the likes of Bull Connor
Malcolm Gladwell (David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants)
In the Bronx, plans were being made to establish a new home for the poor. Many of the homeless were sick and needed more permanent accommodation than that offered by our night shelter. We had bought a large abandoned building from the city for one dollar. A co-worker offered to be the contractor and arranged for an architect to draw up plans for the renovations. Government regulations required that an elevator be installed for the use of the disabled. Mother would not allow an elevator. The city offered to pay for the elevator. Its offer was refused. After all the negotiations and plans, the project for the poor was abandoned because an elevator for the handicapped was unacceptable.
Christopher Hitchens (The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice)
People who suffer oppression for their bodies, such as ethnic minorities, women, and the disabled, don't have the luxury to identify out of it. Yet, our institutions continue to promote the belief that the most oppressed group in history consists of healthy and often privileged people - such as white middle class men - who are self identifying into oppressed groups using the phrase 'born in the wrong body'. Thanks to not suffering the same limitations experienced by groups they wish to be part of, they exert immense influence on the regulators and these communities, where they position themselves as leaders and spokespeople. They are then redefining the aims and priorities of these groups and preventing genuine members from freely discussing issues that affect them.
Isidora Sanger (Born in the Right Body: Gender Identity Ideology From a Medical and Feminist Perspective)
The big question in cosmology in the early 1960s was did the universe have a beginning? Many scientists were instinctively opposed to the idea, because they felt that a point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God to determine how the universe would start off. This was clearly a fundamental question, and it was just what I needed to complete my PhD thesis. Roger Penrose had shown that once a dying star had contracted to a certain radius, there would inevitably be a singularity, that is a point where space and time came to an end. Surely, I thought, we already knew that nothing could prevent a massive cold star from collapsing under its own gravity until it reached a singularity of infinite density. I realised that similar arguments could be applied to the expansion of the universe. In this case, I could prove there were singularities where space–time had a beginning. A eureka moment came in 1970, a few days after the birth of my daughter, Lucy. While getting into bed one evening, which my disability made a slow process, I realised that I could apply to black holes the casual structure theory I had developed for singularity theorems. If general relativity is correct and the energy density is positive, the surface area of the event horizon—the boundary of a black hole—has the property that it always increases when additional matter or radiation falls into it. Moreover, if two black holes collide and merge to form a single black hole, the area of the event horizon around the resulting black hole is greater than the sum of the areas of the event horizons around the original black holes.
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. GALATIANS 6:8 JUNE 8 God gives us life, and this life continually re-creates itself if we stay in harmony with Him. For He not only creates, He re-creates. But if you abandon Him, if you cut Him off, if you stop the practice of devotion, if you cease the cultivation of your spiritual understanding, then disabilities creep in and you begin to deteriorate. The next question is: How can we recover our identification with God so that we become vital and well? Important in this are the thought patterns we constantly employ, the attitudes by which we live, the pictures of ourselves that we form in our consciousness. There is a great life force that should work for health in us through God, and we must release it.
Norman Vincent Peale (Positive Living Day by Day)
Predominantly inattentive type Perhaps the majority of girls with AD/HD fall into the primarily inattentive type, and are most likely to go undiagnosed. Generally, these girls are more compliant than disruptive and get by rather passively in the academic arena. They may be hypoactive or lethargic. In the extreme, they may even seem narcoleptic. Because they do not appear to stray from cultural norms, they will rarely come to the attention of their teacher. Early report cards of an inattentive type girl may read, "She is such a sweet little girl. She must try harder to speak up in class." She is often a shy daydreamer who avoids drawing attention to herself. Fearful of expressing herself in class, she is concerned that she will be ridiculed or wrong. She often feels awkward, and may nervously twirl the ends of her hair. Her preferred seating position is in the rear of the classroom. She may appear to be listening to the teacher, even when she has drifted off and her thoughts are far away. These girls avoid challenges, are easily discouraged, and tend to give up quickly. Their lack of confidence in themselves is reflected in their failure excuses, such as, "I can't," "It's too hard," or "I used to know it, but I can't remember it now." The inattentive girl is likely to be disorganized, forgetful, and often anxious about her school work. Teachers may be frustrated because she does not finish class work on time. She may mistakenly be judged as less bright than she really is. These girls are reluctant to volunteer for a project orjoin a group of peers at recess. They worry that other children will humiliate them if they make a mistake, which they are sure they will. Indeed, one of their greatest fears is being called on in class; they may stare down at their book to avoid eye contact with the teacher, hoping that the teacher will forget they exist for the moment. Because interactions with the teacher are often anxiety-ridden, these girls may have trouble expressing themselves, even when they know the answer. Sometimes, it is concluded that they have problems with central auditory processing or expressive language skills. More likely, their anxiety interferes with their concentration, temporarily reducing their capacity to both speak and listen. Generally, these girls don't experience this problem around family or close friends, where they are more relaxed. Inattentive type girls with a high IQ and no learning disabilities will be diagnosed with AD/HD very late, if ever. These bright girls have the ability and the resources to compensate for their cognitive challenges, but it's a mixed blessing. Their psychological distress is internalized, making it less obvious, but no less damaging. Some of these girls will go unnoticed until college or beyond, and many are never diagnosed they are left to live with chronic stress that may develop into anxiety and depression as their exhausting, hidden efforts to succeed take their toll. Issues
Kathleen G. Nadeau (Understanding Girls With AD/HD)
Unfortunately, sitting rests the parts of the body that don’t need much of it while working the parts that desperately do. Specifically, it disengages the lower extremities while utilizing the spine. (This is in sharp contrast to squatting, which disengages the spine while utilizing the lower extremities.) Because sitting positions the spine vertically, it provides no rest or relief from the gravitational forces that compress it. Without a periodic therapeutic reprieve through the day, the relentless load overwhelms the entire structure, joints and muscles alike. To maintain an erect seated posture, some muscle groups in the back have to continually contract. Since this requires a great deal of energy, the muscles quickly become fatigued. (That is why slumping is more comfortable: It takes less energy to maintain.) When the muscles tire, you rely on the backrest more and your muscles less. The less you rely on your muscles, the weaker and more dysfunctional they become. The weaker and more dysfunctional they become, the more you rely on the backrest. The more you rely on the backrest, the more you tend to slump. The more you slump, the more pronounced the debilitating C-shaped curvature becomes. This weakens the muscles in your back even further, which causes them to overload the joints they serve. Sitting in chairs affects even the areas seemingly at rest (particularly the hips and knees). Because sitting keeps the joints static for long periods, the muscles that serve them become fixed in a short, tight position. When at last you do get up and move, the muscles impose more stress on these joints, thereby increasing their susceptibility to wear and tear. The prolonged stasis also prevents the joints from being lubricated with nourishing synovial fluid. Once depleted, the hips and knees, like the spine, deteriorate and erode. Is it any wonder that the areas most traumatized by sitting, namely, the lower back, hips, and knees, are also the most arthritic and disabled areas of the body in the world today? The real mystery is why so few people have made the connection between prolonged sitting and the epidemic of chronic pain. In fact, they need only look to their own bodies for an abundance of evidence.
Joseph Weisberg (3 Minutes to a Pain-Free Life: The Groundbreaking Program for Total Body Pain Prevention and Rapid Relief)
In the logic of ableism, anyone who can handle such an (allegedly) horrible life must be strong; a lesser man would have given up in despair years ago. Indeed, Reeve's refusal to “give up” is precisely why the FBL selected Reeve for their model of strength; in the “billboard backstories” section of their website, they praise Reeve for trying to “beat paralysis and the spinal cord injuries” rather than “giv[ing] up.” Asserting that Goldberg is successful because of her hard work suggests that other people with dyslexia and learning disabilities who have not met with similar success have simply failed to engage in hard work; unlike Whoopi Goldberg, they are apparently unwilling to devote themselves to success. Similarly, by positioning Weihenmayer's ascent of Everest as a matter of vision, the FBL implies that most blind people, who have not ascended Everest or accomplished equivalently astounding feats, are lacking not only eyesight but vision. The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).
Alison Kafer (Feminist, Queer, Crip)
For, finally, what is the rank man occupies in Nature? A nonentity, as contrasted with infinity; a universe, contrasted with nonentity; a middle something between everything and nothing. He is infinitely remote from these two extremes; his existence is not less distant from the nonentity out of which he is taken, than from the infinity in which he is engulfed. His intellect holds the same rank in the order of intelligences, as his body does in the material universe, and all it can attain is, to catch some glimpses of objects that occupy the middle, in eternal despair of knowing either extreme—all things have sprung from nothing, and are borne forward to infinity. Who can follow out such an astonishing career? The Author of these wonders, and he alone, can comprehend them. This condition, the middle, namely, between two extremes, is characteristic of all our faculties. Our senses perceive nothing in the extreme. A very loud sound deafens us; a very intense light blinds us; a very great or a very short distance disables our vision; excessive length or excessive brevity obscures discourse; too much pleasure cloys, and unvaried harmony offends us. Extreme heat, or extreme cold, destroys sensation. Any qualities in excess are hurtful to us, and pass beyond the ranges of our senses. We cannot be said to feel them, but to endure them. Extreme youth and extreme old age alike enfeeble the mind; too much or too little food, disturbs its operations; too much, or too little instruction, represses its vigor. Extremes are to us, as though they did not exist, and we are nothing in reference to them. They elude us, or we elude them. Such is our real state; our acquirements are confined within limits which we cannot pass, alike incapable of attaining universal knowledge or of remaining in total ignorance. We are in the middle of a vast expanse, always unfixed, fluctuating between ignorance and knowledge; if we think of advancing further, our object shifts its position and eludes our grasp; it steals away and takes an eternal flight that nothing can arrest. This is our natural condition, altogether contrary, however, to our inclinations. We are inflamed with a desire of exploring everything, and of building a tower that shall rise into infinity, but our edifice is shattered to pieces, and the ground beneath it discloses a profound abyss.
Blaise Pascal
told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.
Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
While we sat at the bar, Dave told me the most important advice about talking to women I had ever received, and that was to be as relaxed as possible and not fear rejection. Dave then began hooking up with some girl who looked like a hybrid of Rosie O’Donnell and Miss Piggy, leaving me alone to ponder his words.” “When I was in 8th grade, there was this girl named Sandra who I used to ride the school bus with. Sandra was about 5’2, 120 lbs, and looked like the Hamburglar. She was the prettiest girl in my class.” “In my mind I was the life of the party and felt as though I could do no wrong when it came to interacting with the opposite sex. That was until Marissa caught me red handed hooking up with some girl who looked like a combination of John Madden and Andre the Giant, tapping me on the shoulder and kicking me square in the nuts.” “I was starting to feel bad about how I treated women. Oh wait, no I wasn’t. The girls at Binghamton were nothing more than a bunch of dumb sluts that just wanted to get drunk and suck dick, and besides, they were all going to make a lot more money than me in the future. So I may as well catch brains while these bitches were dumb enough to blow me.” “Out of all the people I could’ve stumbled into blackout drunk, why did it have to be THE MOOSE? As son as she saw me her 300 lb frame waddled over, and she jammed her tongue down my throat, devouring me as though I were a Big Mac. This was embarrassing. Here I was making out with some girl who looked like Eric Cartman in a dress, and everybody was watching. My life was effectively over.” “After annihilating Ruben’s toilet, I looked over my shoulder for some much-needed toilet paper, when to my shock and dismay there was not a single sheet of paper in sight. There’s no way in hell I was rejoining the party covered in poop and I would have wiped my ass with anything. That’s when I noticed his New York Yankees bath towel.” “I spent the rest of my week off getting completely shitfaced with Chris, and that’s when I realized I might be developing a drinking problem. At Bar None, hooking up with some girl who looked like the Loch Ness Monster; this shit had to stop. Alcohol was turning me into a drunken mess, and I vowed right then and there to quit drinking and start smoking more weed immediately.” “I got a new roommate. His name was Erick and he was an ex-marine. Erick and I didn’t know each other, but he knew Kevin, and he also knew that I didn’t shower and that last semester I left a used condom on the floor for two weeks without throwing it away. Eric therefore did not want to live with me.” “Believe it or not, I got another job working with the disabled. See, Manny was nice enough to hook me up with a position as a job coach at the Lavelle School for the Blind. The kid’s name was Fred and he was blind with cerebral palsy. Fred loved dogs and I loved smoking week. Bad combination, and I was fired with 3 days left in the program after allowing Fred to run across the street into oncoming traffic, because I had smoked a bowl an hour earlier. Manny and I never spoke again.” “My life was a dream and a nightmare rolled into one. Here I was living this carefree existence, getting drunk, boning bitches, and playing Sega Genesis in between. Oh wait, what am I talking about? My life was awesome. It’s the rest of my life that’s going to suck.
Alexander Strenger
WATCH THAT QCD POSITION! While I was writing this book, I hosted a lighting seminar for neophyte photographers using cameras of all breeds, and out of 30 photographers in two sessions, no fewer than four Canon shooters were having trouble setting the aperture when using the Manual exposure mode I was having them use while working with studio flash units. (Each of them rarely used Manual.) All four had accidentally set the QCD switch to Lock (if they were 7D owners) or to the On (only) position (if they were 50D or 40D users), disabling the Quick Control Dial. I expect that this happens more frequently than I suspected, so I’m calling it to your attention once more in these two sidebars.
David D. Busch (David Busch's Canon EOS 7D Guide to Digital Photography, 1st ed (David Busch's Digital Photography Guides))
Persons with Disability (PWD), Ex-Serviceman (XSM), Kashmiri Migrant (KM). Please refer to the Norms for the same. There are 394 vacancies for the above position (200 Electronics, 120 Mechanical, 57 Computer Science,
Anonymous
Ironside's position on disability, on the other hand, is precisely what generated media coverage, but there, too, the assumption that disability is best met with abortion went largely unchallenged. In a televised debate about abortion, Ironside described the abortion of “a baby [that] is going to be born severely disabled” as the “act of a loving mother”; she then offered that, faced with such “a deeply suffering child,” she would not hesitate to “put a pillow over its face,” as would “any good mother.
Alison Kafer (Feminist, Queer, Crip)
The changes that occur during the prodromal phase have been broadly characterised by Hafner and colleagues (Hafner et al., 1995), though other more intensive studies are reviewed and summarised in Yung et al. (1996). These and other studies (Jones et al., 1993) showed that although diagnostic specificity and ultimately potentially effective treatment comes with the later onset of positive psychotic symptoms, most of the disabling consequences of the underlying disorder emerge and manifest well prior to this phase. In particular, deficits in social functioning occur predominantly during the prodromal phase and prior to treatment. Hafner et al. (1995) demonstrated clearly that the main factor determining social outcome two years after first admission for schizophrenia is acquired social status during the prodromal phase of the disorder. The importance of this phase was previously poorly appreciated because no conceptual
Max Birchwood (Early Intervention in Psychosis: A Guide to Concepts, Evidence and Interventions (Wiley Series in Clinical Psychology Book 70))
a deeply personal form of service needs to define the church's expression of the gospel to others. Keeping the manifestations of mercy personal helps prevent us from operating from a position of power. Recall that Jesus "made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant." If the One who possesses all power and authority was willing to set that aside to relate to us personally, how can we do any less for others?
Stephanie O. Hubach (Same Lake, Different Boat: Coming Alongside People Touched by Disability)
Two of my teachers made a huge positive difference for me. One was my football coach who did not think I was a loser, and encouraged me to stay in school and keep trying. The other was a special ed teacher who realized that I had a reading disability but that I wasn’t retarded. She honestly told me that she wasn’t trained to help people with dyslexia but that she knew it existed and that it wasn’t my fault. She knew how hard I was trying. She spent a year teaching me to fill in the blanks on paperwork such as job applications so I would have that skill when I needed it. She also let me leave class early so I could saunter into the lunch room from the direction of the “regular” classrooms so other kids wouldn’t know I was a SPED.” —Eddie—
Yvonna Graham (Dyslexia Tool Kit for Tutors and Parents: What to do when phonics isn't enough)
There is no simple way to determine when and where to get help. Many factors come into play, including the child’s age, family’s financial status, insurance, knowledge of resources, religious affiliation, availability of services in community, and so on. Parents may seek outside assistance for their adopted child when other factors such as a divorce, job loss, or other stresses compound the family needs. Parents are generally in the best position to determine when to get help, but advice from relatives, family physicians, teachers, and others in a position to know the family should be carefully considered. Services for children with special needs are provided by a variety of professionals. A physician—pediatrician or the family practitioner—is usually the place to begin. Families may be referred to a neurologist for a thorough assessment and diagnosis of neurological functioning (related to cognitive or learning disabilities, seizure disorders or other central nervous system problems). For specific communication difficulties, families may consult with a speech and language therapist, while a physical therapist would develop a treatment plan to enhance motor development. A rehabilitation technologist or an occupational therapist prescribes adaptive aids or activities of daily living. Early childhood educators specializing in working with children with special needs may be called a variety of titles, including Head Start teachers, early childhood special education teacher, or early childhood specialist.
Mary Hopkins-Best (Toddler Adoption: The Weaver's Craft Revised Edition)
Pope says, “Engage your critics, and don’t confront them in an argumentative way.” We’re taught in school to debate. We’re taught to take a stand and use knowledge, skills, and cleverness to win converts and disable the other side. I remember in high school and university classes being asked to take a position out of a hat and then stand up and win the argument. I grew up good at winning, but looking back I see that I wasn’t getting opponents on the same page. I was shutting them up with powerful advocacy. I’ll bet you’ve seen the same thing from the outspoken in meetings and in conversation with your bosses. Getting people on the same page begins with getting rid of the need to always win the debate.
Jason Jennings (The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change)
Do you think ADHD should be recognized as a separate disability category according to IDEA? Support your position. What are the three subtypes of ADHD? List three symptoms typical of each subtype. Identify three possible causes of ADHD. Give an example of each. Give five examples of characteristics typical of children and adolescents with ADHD. Why do you think pupils with ADHD frequently exhibit other academic and behavioral difficulties? How is ADHD diagnosed? What role do parents and teachers play in the diagnostic process? What role does medication play in the treatment of ADHD? Why is this approach controversial? Describe three other intervention options for students with ADHD. How can assistive technology help students with ADHD? ADHD is usually a lifelong condition. In what ways might this disorder affect the lives of adults with ADHD? Why are some professionals concerned about the identification of ADHD in students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds?
Richard M. Gargiulo (Special Education in Contemporary Society: An Introduction to Exceptionality)
In their ongoing war against evil capitalists, some vengeful Democrats have their eyes on banks, which they blame for making millions of loans that resulted in foreclosures and the 2008 financial crisis. Never mind that it was progressives who forced the government to make these loans to low-income borrowers with poor credit ratings through the Community Reinvestment Act and anti-discrimination laws. They promoted minority home ownership without regard to the owners’ ability to repay, and the result was catastrophic. But being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry—just pass a misguided policy and blame everyone else when it predictably fails. Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, emboldened by Democrats recapturing control of the House, issued a stern warning to bankers before the 2019 session began. “I have not forgotten” that “you foreclosed on our houses,” she said, and “had us sign on the line for junk and for mess that we could not afford. I’m going to do to you what you did to us.”62 How’s that for good governance—using her newfound power as incoming chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee to punish bank executives for the disaster she and her fellow Democrats caused? Waters is also targeting corporations for allegedly excluding minorities and women from executive positions. Forming a new subcommittee on diversity and inclusion, she immediately held a hearing to discuss the importance of examining the systematic exclusion of women, people of color, persons with disabilities, gays, veterans, and other disadvantaged groups.63 Why concentrate on policies to stimulate economic growth and improve people’s standards of living when you can employ identity politics to demonize your opponents?
David Limbaugh (Guilty By Reason of Insanity: Why The Democrats Must Not Win)
There are some positive things to an education system that has multiple tracks. Kids are not completely thrown out - there are still tracks open to them, which prevents them from dropping out of school altogether. At the same time, however, there also appears an irrational outcome: most of these kids appear to be of regular intelligence & do not have learning disabilities, but they are labeled 'slow' from a young age.
Teo You Yenn
I’m sorry if my words hurt you earlier. I thought I’d been pretty clear about my not wanting kids.” Alex winced, but tried to cover it by tucking her hair behind her right ear. “You were. I remember you saying it the first night. But we clicked on everything else and I guess I thought you might possibly start to rethink your position.” He could understand why she would think that. They had clicked on everything. She’d fit into his house as if she’d always been here. Hell, she fit into his life as if she’d always been there. All of the worries he’d had about her youth had faded. She was more mature for her age than most of the men he knew, and that was the truth. “I don’t want this,” he motioned between them, “to end because of just this one thing.” She frowned. “I hope you didn’t mean that the way it sounded, because that one thing is very important to me. I’m almost thirty-two. As trite as it is to say, my childbearing time is ticking away.” Duncan growled, pissed that he couldn’t articulate his feelings the way he needed to. He was losing her, he could see it in her eyes. “I don’t want the responsibility of children, but I don’t want our physical or emotional relationship to end. I enjoy having you in my life.” She gave him a narrow-eyed look. “It’s convenient, right? Having a woman in your house and bed, falling in love with you? I can’t just be ‘enjoyed’ Duncan, I need more that that. I felt like we had a deeper connection than that.” Scowling, he turned to look at the cold fireplace. Then her words slowly sank in. She’d said she was falling in love with him. Fuck… Alex muttered a curse under her breath and pushed to her feet to pace. Duncan watched her move, thoughts swirling in his mind. She thought she loved him, but she’d only been here a couple of days. Yes, they’d been together the entire time since she’d been here, but surely she didn’t think she loved him. Maybe she was less mature than he thought. No one could decide to tie themselves to a man that quickly, let alone a disabled veteran destined to have long-term emotional and medical issues. She paused in her pacing, as if coming to a decision. “I think I’m going to go home.” The words fell into the silence and he lost his breath. But he couldn’t blame her. She wanted more than he could give her. Once again, like with Melanie, he was being tossed over for another man, this one just so far unnamed. “If you make your reservations, I can drive you whenever you need me to.” She blinked at him, a strange expression on her face, then she shook her head as if she couldn’t believe it was ending. He couldn’t either. “All right. Goodnight.” Duncan
J.M. Madden (Embattled Ever After (Lost and Found #5))
The Medical Research Council’s PACE Trial of behavioural interventions for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) attracted considerable opposition from the outset and the Principal Investigators had difficulty in recruiting a sufficient number of participants. PACE is the acronym for Pacing, Activity, and Cognitive behavioural therapy, a randomised Evaluation, interventions that, according to one of the Principal Investigators, are without theoretical foundation. The MRC’s PACE Trial seemingly inhabits a unique and unenviable position in the history of medicine. It is believed to be the first and only clinical trial that patients and the charities that support them have tried to stop before a single patient could be recruited and is the only clinical trial that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has ever funded.
Malcolm Hooper
Gustavo Arcos, a loyal revolutionary who was with Castro in the second car when they attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, was shot in his back. The shot severely wounded him and disabled his right leg, thereby causing him a lifetime of pain. A few years later, Arcos went to Mexico with the intention of gathering support as well as money and munitions for the movement. After the revolution, for his loyalty, Gustavo Arcos was appointed the Cuban Ambassador to Belgium. However, as ambassador he became disillusioned with the Soviet form of communism and began to see Castro more as a dictator than a revolutionary leader. When he returned from his duties in Belgium, instead of being able to freely leave Cuba, Arcos was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison on charges of being a counter-revolutionary. In 1981, after his release from his years of confinement, he attempted to escape from Cuba, for which he was sent back to prison. After his second release, Arcos decided that he could better serve the people of Cuba by staying and accepting the position of the Executive Secretary of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights. His committee rapidly grew from occupying a small office in Havana, to being a nationwide organization recognized by the United Nations. Gustavo Arcos died of natural causes on August 8, 2006, at 79 years of age.
Hank Bracker
I saw a documentary about prostitution in Holland a few years ago, that said over there health insurance actually pays for monthly visits to a prostitute for the disabled, because they feel that sex is part of a healthy life, so unmarried disabled men have a right to have sex, even if it's with a paid prostitute. Pretty bizarre, huh? Can you imagine a US health insurance company picking up the bill for your romp in the hay with a hooker?
Oliver Markus Malloy
What Does Poor Posture Look Like? • Stiff & rigid • Slumping • Slouching • Hunched over • Rounded shoulders • Overly arched back • Stumbling • Head forward In sensitivity, we must be aware that many people suffer from poor posture because of physical disability, injury, health issues, heredity, obesity, or musculoskeletal construction. These descriptions are not meant to offend or judge people who are unable to change their posture.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
4 Times to Get Tough . . . 1. Self-Respect—You don’t have to take everything on the chin and lose the respect of yourself and others in the process. Don’t be a doormat or a pushover by allowing people to disrespect or run over you. Stand firm in your beliefs and values. 2. Self-Preservation—Understand and set boundaries. Decide what is and what is not acceptable in how people treat you. Claim your power to live life on your terms and not at the whims of others’ unreasonable requests and demands. 3. Protecting others—If you are a parent of a child or a caretaker of the elderly or disabled, it is your moral duty to defend them to the end. 4. Self-Defense—Have you ever felt threatened, unsafe, or abused because of another’s behavior? Assert yourself and do whatever is necessary to ensure your safety. Being kind DOES NOT mean you should excuse such behavior.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Action: 8 Ways to Initiate & Activate Forward Momentum for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #4))
UN-Impressive ‘Compliments’ . . . • When compliments are used as a passive-aggressive way to manipulate others for personal gain. • Delivering a back-handed compliment which makes others feel bad. • Dishonesty—you say it but really do not mean it. • False bravado. • Manufacturing the moment for your ulterior motives. • Pandering to win affection, a vote, or approval. • Exaggerating and being over-zealous. • Being hypocritical. • Expressing preferential treatment or making an unfair comparison. • When it draws attention to a person’s weakness, disabilities, or shortcomings. • When it is inappropriate and off-color.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Action: 8 Ways to Initiate & Activate Forward Momentum for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #4))
Showing participants in a positive light may be the first time some parents have had their child celebrated at all, let alone publicly. The church cannot underestimate the meaningful way this affects a family of a child with special needs. Using the public venue of a worship service will shape the entire church's view of disability, reminding them of God's value for everyone.
Amy Fenton Lee (Leading a Special Needs Ministry)
The way you deal with your stress can save or sink you, depending on what it is. Of every 10 workers, 3 suffer from total scam, the Burnout Syndrome. Even at lower levels, stress can cause physical and psychological problems, such as headaches, exhaustion, high blood pressure, gastrointestinal problems, the feeling of disability, and depression.
Daniel Travis (Mental Toughness: The Human Behavior Psychology guide: Master your Emotions developing a Growth Mindset with Positive Thinking tactics Increasing self Confidence achieving Success in Life & Business)
The medical model of disability frames atypical bodies and minds as deviant, pathological, and defective, best understood and addressed in medical terms. In this framework, the proper approach to disability is to “‘treat’ the condition and the person with the condition rather than ‘treating' the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people's lives.” Although this framing of disability is called the “medical” model, it's important to note that its use isn't limited to doctors and other service providers; what characterizes the medical model isn't the position of the person (or institution) using it, but the positioning of disability as an exclusively medical problem and, especially, the conceptualization of such positioning as both objective fact and common sense.
Alison Kafer (Feminist, Queer, Crip)
This point is an excellent target when your opponent is at close range. By gripping the collarbone, you can dig your fingers down behind the natural curve of the bone and towards the centerline of the body. It is most active when your opponent has their arm raised and given the structural weakness of the body at this location. I consider this point one as being utilized to gain positional dominance over an opponent, as it will quickly cause the opponent to bend at the knees and expose other areas for follow-on strikes. Additionally, hard chops or hammerfist to the collarbone, besides breaking it and aiding in disabling the arm on that side, will trigger this point causing the same automatic bending of the knees. Taking split second advantage of their compromised body position is one of the reasons that I feel this point was included in the Bubishi, which is not to mention the systemic effect of the energetic system. This point is usually gained when an attacker launches a punch towards your head that is effectively defeated and their attacking arm is captured. This allows for a quick attack on ST-12 with your other hand that causes the opponent to buckle at the knees.
Rand Cardwell (36 Deadly Bubishi Points: The Science and Technique of Pressure Point Fighting - Defend Yourself Against Pressure Point Attacks!)
Boundaries can, theoretically, work, but only for a privileged subset of your organization. They’re simply not a sustainable option for the vast majority of workers, especially those who aren’t in senior positions, who are women, who are people of color, or who are disabled. For those groups, attempting to maintain them can lead to an office reputation as difficult, aloof, unresponsive, or the dreaded “such a millennial” or “not a team player.” It might mean getting passed over for promotions or, eventually, getting fired. You can’t 4-Hour Workweek your way out of this problem. You need something structural.
Anne Helen Petersen (Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home)
God's perfect will wins within me...that disables any competition, in that divine provisional place and position, failure can never be found!
Dr Tracey Bond
To be regarded as "disabled" in the U.S. is to experience powerlessness on all kinds of levels  -- physical, psychological, political. To be considered disabled is to be put in a supplicant position, the position of the "patient," told to be quiet; if you need something, to ask kindly for it. These are the strictures of disability's Jim Crow. It is really about power: disabled people are considered powerless. Anyone with any savvy is sure to tell others that they don't consider themselves disabled. President Roosevelt called himself a "cured cripple" for that very reason. "If I am talking with a person fairly ignorant of disability rights, and I want to impress upon them that we are legion, I will say, ‘Thirty to 45 percent of the population of this country is disabled,'" professor David Pfeiffer says. "That is a way of getting to the discussion of ‘what is disability'  -- so they will realize that everyone is, or will be, disabled. "But ‘disability' is an ideological term. To name a person as ‘disabled' is to give them an inferior position. In our society people identified as disabled are second-class, third-class, or even worse-class citizens. We live in a constant state of discrimination. Identifying oneself or another person as a ‘person with a disability' is an ideological act. There is no other way to describe it." Which is why not everyone with a functional difference will identify as disabled, he says. Being disabled "is a damning thing.
Mary Johnson (Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve & The Case Against Disability Rights)
Accepting my quirks, eccentricities and sensitivities, using them as superpowers not disabilities.
Maria Teresa Pratico (My Soul's Dance, Accepting the Shadows while Embracing the Light: Poems about Death and Rebirth)
Let's start at the beginning: the first step of the unmasking process is realizing you're Autistic. It might not feel like it's an active step toward self-acceptance or authenticity, but coming to understand yourself as disabled is a pretty dramatic reframing of your life. Almost every neuro-diverse person I've spoken to for this book shared that discovering they were Autistic was a powerful aha moment, one that prompted them to rethink every narrative they'd believed about who they were. Painful labels they'd carried around inside themselves for years suddenly didn't seem as relevant: it wasn't that they were stupid, or clueless, or lazy, they were just disabled. It wasn't that their effort had never been enough, or that they were fundamentally wrong or bad. They simply hadn't been treated with the compassion they deserved, or given the tools that would have allowed them to flourish. Naming their position in society as a disabled person helped them to externalize that which had long been internalized. It proved that none of their suffering had been their fault.
Devon Price (Unmasking Autism [Hardcover], How to Break Up with Your Phone, Hyperfocus, One Thing 4 Books Collection Set)
Most people, no matter how talented, will at some point find themselves in a position where one or more of their skills don’t measure up to the skills of those around them. Great leaders find unexpected ways to bring out the best in themselves and in others. Do whatever you have to do in order to make everyone on your team feel like they’re valuable contributors. And instead of expecting others to overcome a weakness, get creative and find ways to help them compensate, which often involves leveraging hidden talents. Ultimately, you and your organization will be stronger for it. Muhammad Ali, who struggled in school because he was learning disabled, was quoted as follows: “I never said I was the smartest, I said I was the greatest.” It’s your job to help people be the greatest.
Alison Levine (On the Edge: The Art of High-Impact Leadership)
...the figure of the disabled woman is best apprehended as a product of conceptual triangulation. She is a cultural third term, a figure constituted by the originary binary pair of the masculine figure and the feminine figure. Thus, the disabled female figure occupies an intragender position; that is, she is not only defined against the masculine figure, but she is imagined as the antithesis of the normative woman as well.
Lennard J. Davis (The Disability Studies Reader)
How cool could it have been if, when my parents received news of my blindness, their first gut reaction could have been something like, “Oh, then she’ll be just like my old friend from high school!” Instead of facing gloomy scenarios or the pitying comments of others, my parents would have been prepared, with positive associations to someone who shared my disability.
Arielle Silverman (Just Human: The Quest for Disability Wisdom, Respect, and Inclusion)
What is Cerebral Palsy? A wheelchair, a woman, windswept legs, stiffness. And through one side of my body, lack of mobility, and tightness in my knees. That’s all causes by a condition called Cerebral Palsy according to the CDC Cerebral Palsy (CP)- is a group of disorders that affect a person's ability to move and maintain balance and posture. CP is the most common motor disability in childhood. Cerebral means having to do with the brain. Palsy means weakness or problems with using the muscles. But that’s not my definition of Cerebral Palsy my definition of cerebral palsy ce·re·bral pal·sy A condition that makes life more interesting, more of an adventure and more of a journey. You see I could have started this off by stating the old boring medical terms of Cerebral Palsy, but in my personal opinion it would be continuing the stigma’s that I’ve been trying to debunk since I was 18 years old and wouldn’t that be a boring book to read. To be frank, I’m tired of seeing books that don’t focus on the positive side of Cerebral Palsy. Well, OK at least some do, but there’s not very much, so I’ve decided to write this full of stories to explain how I overcome each obstacle with Cerebral Palsy. My name is Tylia L Flores. I’m Handi-capable!
Tylia L. Flores (HANDI-CAPABLE: “STOMPING THE BARRIERS THAT COMES MY WAY”.)
The point of the BoPo movement isn’t necessarily for everyone to simply just “love” their bodies or feel positively about them, but rather, to take a stance against social norms and pressures of what society says beauty “should” be by bringing adequate representation to people of color, people of different ethnicities, people from LGBTQIA+ communities, older adults, and those with disabilities.44 But rather than bringing adequate representation and diversity to society’s ideal body standards, what has unfortunately happened is that many thin, fit, White, and conventionally attractive people, specifically cisgender White women, have taken its message to simply be “love yourself despite your ‘imperfections.’” They’ve taken something that wasn’t meant for them to be used to further validate their own beauty standards.
Jamie Mills (The Easy Way Out: Why Bariatrics Isn't Cheating Obesity, It's Treating It)
Since his father’s death in 1464, Piero de’ Medici had done his best to maintain his family’s preeminent position in Florence. According to a chronicler, Piero enjoyed “great authority, many friends, wealth, and a power similar to his father’s.”24 By 1466, however, Piero, at fifty years old, was increasingly disabled by gout. As a result, government meetings and ambassadorial receptions were held not in the Palazzo della Signoria but in the Palazzo Medici, which increasingly served as the seat of government. Moreover, Piero lacked his father’s shrewdness and experience, and his power and grandeur soon provoked indignation among the citizens. His father had faced similar crises due to rivals and malcontents, most recently in 1458. On that occasion, the Medici maintained their power thanks to Cosimo’s longtime ally, the duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza, who sent troops to quell an insurrection. As mercenary troops poured into the city, Cosimo took the opportunity to arrest 150 opponents, torture a few others, and strengthen his grip on power. However, the death of Sforza in March 1466 robbed Piero, so soon after losing his father, of this reliable supplier of military might.
Ross King (The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance)
It is your disability that makes you unique, deprived of the privileges that you are nevertheless entitled to through your birthright, outside the stereotypes of your social position, in spite of it being part of your very flesh.
Dacia Maraini (The Silent Duchess)
Ambivalence exists in all human relationships, including parent-child. Anna Freud maintained that a mother could never satisfy her infant's needs because those are infinite, but that eventually child and mother outgrow that dependence...In Torn in Tow, the British psycho analyst Rozsika Parker complains that in our open, modern society, the extent of maternal ambivalence is a dark secret. Most mothers treat their occasional wish to be rid of their children as if it were the equivalent of murder itself. Parker proposes that mothering requires two impulses - the impulse to hold on, and the impulse to push away. To be a successful mother you must nurture and love your child, but cannot smother and cling to your child. Mothering involves sailing between what Parker calls 'the Scylla of intrusiveness and the Charybdis of neglect.' She proposes that the sentimental idea of perfect synchrony between mother and child 'can cast a sort of sadness over motherhood - a constant state of mild regret that a delightful oneness seems always out of reach.' Perfection is a horizon virtue, and our very approach to it reveals its immutable distance. The dark portion of maternal ambivalence toward typical children is posited as crucial to the child's individuation. But severely disabled children who will never become independent will not benefit from their parents' negative feelings, and so their situation demands an impossible state of emotional purity. Asking the parents of severely disabled children to feel less negative emotion than parents of healthy children is ludicrous. My experience of these parents was that they all felt both love and despair. You cannot decide whether to be ambivalent/ All you can decide is what to do with your ambivalence. Most of these parents have chosen to act on one side of the ambivalence they feel, and Julia Hollander chose to act on another side, but I am not persuaded that the ambivalence itself was so different from one of these families to the next. I am enough of a creature of my times to admire most the parents who kept their children and made brave sacrifices for them. I nonetheless esteem Julia Hollander for being honest with herself, and for making what all those other families did look like a choice.
Andrew Solomon (Far from the Tree: How Children and Their Parents Learn to Accept One Another . . . Our Differences Unite Us)
So we position ourselves as "sons of the movement," to cite the title of Bobby Noble's 2006 book on the relation fo trans men to feminist and queer cultural landscapes. We interpellate ourselves as the queer kin of feminist foremothers. Or we shift our attention toward the examination and critique of violently toxic forms of masculinity, instead, as Thomas Page McBee has done in his creative nonfiction, including the books Man Alive and Amateur. Or we articulate and amplify a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between power, privilege, and masculinity, utilizing conceptual tools borrowed from intersectional feminisms to differentiate ourselves from cis men and to clarify the many stratifications of race, class, (dis)ability, and sexuality that differentiate transmasculinities from one another.
Hil Malatino (Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad)
Wikipedia: Pygmalion effect The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area. … … According to the Pygmalion effect, the targets of the expectations internalize their positive labels, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly; a similar process works in the opposite direction in the case of low expectations. The idea behind the Pygmalion effect is that increasing the leader's expectation of the follower's performance will result in better follower performance. … The educational psychologist Robert L. Thorndike described the poor quality of the Pygmalion study. The problem with the study was that the instrument used to assess the children's IQ scores was seriously flawed. The average reasoning IQ score for the children in one regular class was in the mentally disabled range, a highly unlikely outcome in a regular class in a garden variety school. In the end, Thorndike concluded that the Pygmalion findings were worthless. It is more likely that the rise in IQ scores from the mentally disabled range was the result of regression toward the mean, not teacher expectations. Moreover, a meta-analysis conducted by Raudenbush showed that when teachers had gotten to know their students for two weeks, the effect of a prior expectancy induction was reduced to virtually zero.
Wikipedia Contributors
While some who support abortion in cases when a child is diagnosed with a disability might be motivated by sincere, if misguided, compassion, this worldview is undergirded by the evil logic of abortion, which insists that those in a position of power—in the case of abortion, the doctor and the pregnant mother—get to decide whether another human being’s life is worth living.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
The text involves some difficult topics – including views on women, black people, colonialism and slavery, disability and queer people. At times it has been uncomfortable to write and I know that parts may be to read, but I hope that it tries to balance the views and experiences, both positive and problematic by modern views, of the time. The lines intersecting historical accuracy, acceptability in fiction and sensitively truthful representation rarely meet comfortably and there are always choices to be made.
Suzanne Moss (Observations on the Danger of Female Curiosity: Including an account of the unnatural tendencies arising on the over-stimulation of the mind of a lady (Curiosity, #1))
a basic income is arguably more justified by the need for economic security than by a desire to eradicate poverty. Martin Luther King captured several aspects of this rather well in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here? [A] host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.15 Twentieth-century welfare states tried to reduce certain risks of insecurity with contributory insurance schemes. In an industrial economy, the probability of so-called ‘contingency risks’, such as illness, workplace accidents, unemployment and disability, could be estimated actuarially. A system of social insurance could be constructed that worked reasonably well for the majority. In a predominantly ‘tertiary’ economy, in which more people are in and out of temporary, part-time and casual jobs and are doing a lot of unpaid job-related work outside fixed hours and workplaces, this route to providing basic security has broken down. The
Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
As it represents and thus conceives of autism as a threat to the normative individual and social body, contemporary advocacy work issues an effective and powerful 'call to arms' against autism. The orientation of contemporary advocacy is clear: to be a 'good' autism advocate is to be positioned 'against' autism, to 'fight' it, 'combat' it, 'defeat' it, and so on. . . It is this war on autism that I take as my focus for the remainder of this book. I do this so as to interrogate how a militarized autism advocacy is systematically producing and sustaining a social environment that is hostile to autistic difference—an environment that, as we shall see, structures and supports possibilities for violence against those who embody autistic difference.
Anne McGuire (War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence (Corporealities: Discourses Of Disability))
You can do anything you stick your mind to. Einstein was dyslexic, Bill Gates has asperger's syndrome, Orlando Bloom also has dyslexia, and Daniel Radcliffe has dyspraxia and (LD), but they all went on to become very successful individuals in this world. I myself have an intellectual disability, but I refuse to let that garbage set me back. You just gotta stay positive, let the critics and sarcasm roll off your back and just keep grinding nowhere but forward. You don't have to be smart to crush your dreams, you just have to have the heart and determination.
Cliff Hannold
Marxism claims to be more than a science. It does more than make a historical prophecy. It claims to be the basis for practical political action. It criticizes existing society, and it asserts that it can lead the way to a better world. But according to Marx’s own theory, we cannot at will alter the economic reality by, for example, legal reforms. Politics can do no more than ‘shorten and lessen the birth-pangs’.23 This, I think, is an extremely poor political programme, and its poverty is a consequence of the third-rate place which it attributes to political power in the hierarchy of powers. For according to Marx, the real power lies in the evolution of machinery; next in importance is the system of economic class-relationships; and the least important influence is that of politics. A directly opposite view is implied in the position we have reached in our analysis. It considers political power as fundamental. Political power, from this point of view, can control economic power. This means an immense extension of the field of political activities. We can ask what we wish to achieve and how to achieve it. We can, for instance, develop a rational political programme for the protection of the economically weak. We can make laws to limit exploitation. We can limit the working day; but we can do much more. By law, we can insure the workers (or better still, all citizens) against disability, unemployment, and old age. In this way we can make impossible such forms of exploitation as are based upon the helpless economic position of a worker who must yield to anything in order not to starve. And when we are able by law to guarantee a livelihood to everybody willing to work, and there is no reason why we should not achieve that, then the protection of the freedom of the citizen from economic fear and economic intimidation will approach completeness. From this point of view, political power is the key to economic protection. Political power and its control is everything. Economic power must not be permitted to dominate political power; if necessary, it must be fought and brought under control by political power.
Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
Mark, at dinner, said he’d been re-reading “Anna Karenina”. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses—catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eyestrain. The chronic physical disabilities—ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood Lying by omission turns inevitably into positive lying. The implications of literature are that human beings are controlled, if not by reason, at least by comprehensible, well-organized, avowable sentiments. Whereas the facts are quite different. Sometimes the sentiments come in, sometimes they don’t. All for love, or the world well lost; but love may be the title of nobility given to an inordinate liking for a particular person’s smell or texture, a lunatic desire for the repetition of a sensation produced by some particular dexterity. Or consider those cases (seldom published, but how numerous, as anyone in a position to know can tell!), those cases of the eminent statesmen, churchmen, lawyers, captains of industry—seemingly so sane, demonstrably so intelligent, publicly so high-principled; but, in private, under irresistible compulsion towards brandy, towards young men, towards little girls in trains, towards exhibitionism, towards gambling or hoarding, towards bullying, towards being whipped, towards all the innumerable, crazy perversions of the lust for money and power and position on the one hand, for sexual pleasure on the other. Mere tics and tropisms, lunatic and unavowable cravings—these play as much part in human life as the organized and recognized sentiments. And imaginative literature suppresses the fact. Propagates an enormous lie about the nature of men and women.
Aldous Huxley (Eyeless in Gaza)
Mark, at dinner, said he’d been re-reading “Anna Karenina”. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses—catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eyestrain. The chronic physical disabilities—ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood.
Aldous Huxley (Eyeless in Gaza)