quotations about AIDS
Like some rabid animal, AIDS picked me up by the scruff of my neck, shook me senseless, and spat me out forever changed.
MICHAEL CALLEN
attributed, Queer Quotes: On Coming Out and Culture, Love and Lust, Politics and Pride
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
SUSAN SONTAG
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
It's really important for people who are HIV positive to reach out to let other people know that they can be tested, they can find out they can still live a life -- a positive life, a happy life.
LAURA BUSH
attributed, Changing the Present
AIDS. That virus too small to imagine travelling through our fluids, even a drop or two of saliva ... and unlocking our antibodies with its little picks, so that our insides lose their balance and we topple into pneumonia, into starvation. Love and death, they can't be pried apart any more.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving.... AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay alive.
CHRIS CRUTCHER
King of the Mild Frontier
I get tested for HIV twice a year.... One has to be socially aware. It's part of being a decent human to be tested for STDs. It's just disgusting behaviour when people don't. It's so irresponsible.
SCARLETT JOHANSSON
London Telegraph, Dec. 10, 2006
I have a beautiful address book a friend gave me in 1966. I literally cannot open it again. Ever. It sits on the shelf with over a hundred names crossed out. What is there to say? There are no words. I'll never understand why it happened to us.
JERRY HERMAN
attributed, Queer Quotes: On Coming Out and Culture, Love and Lust, Politics and Pride
Our HIV-positive friends get up and put on their best, bravest faces every morning, and by noon, they may look pretty good. But their nights are long and arduous--and for many of them, lonely. Perhaps it is time we journalists started inundating the public with information about AIDS again. Perhaps it is time our readers started paying attention again. It's still out there, and our friends are still suffering, despite how good they may look to you and me.
JAMIE O'NEIL
The Gay and Lesbian Times of the Desert
History will judge us on how we respond to the AIDS emergency in Africa ... whether we stood around with watering cans and watched while a whole continent burst into flames ... or not.
BONO
attributed, Lines for Living
HIV does not make people dangerous to know, so you can shake their hands and give them a hug -- Heaven knows they need it.
PRINCESS DIANA
Daily Star, Apr. 23, 1991
We live in a completely interdependent world, which simply means we cannot escape each other. How we respond to AIDS depends, in part, on whether we understand this interdependence. It is not someone else's problem. This is everybody's problem.
BILL CLINTON
attributed, Healthline
A planet without AIDS is possible, but to create that planet we must do away with the vestiges of the old planet where testing positive to the HIV virus effectively relegates an individual to the subclass of Human society.
OCHE OTORKPA
The Unseen Terrorist
As individual and unpredictable as this illness seems to be, the one thing I found I could say with certainty was this: AIDS makes things more intensely what they already are.
MARK DOTY
Heaven's Cost
So much has happened in the years since Aids first emerged. Whereas once an HIV diagnosis was a death sentence, today patients can live long and full lives. But some things have remained constant. Even as the sociocultural perceptions of Aids have changed fundamentally, it remains a highly stigmatised disease. Remnants of discrimination can be seen everywhere, from the testing of healthcare workers and segregation of prisoners to travel restrictions and criminalisation.
LAWRENCE O. GOSTIN
"How AIDS brought global health to the world political stage", Eyewitness News, February 22, 2016
In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes -- homosexuality, sexual disease, and death -- about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.
MARTIN AMIS
"Making Sense of AIDS", The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America
It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
attributed, Women Know Everything!
Like no other illness, AIDS tests our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes -- to empathize with the plight of our fellow man. While most would agree that the AIDS orphan or the transfusion victim or the wronged wife contracted the disease through no fault of their own, it has too often been easy for some to point to the unfaithful husband or the promiscuous youth or the gay man and say "This is your fault. You have sinned." I don't think that's a satisfactory response. My faith reminds me that we all are sinners.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, Dec. 1, 2006
The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
SUSAN SONTAG
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
If condoms and potentially microbicides can prevent millions of deaths [from AIDS], they should be made more widely available. I know that there are those who, out of sincere religious conviction, oppose such measures. And with these folks, I must respectfully but unequivocally disagree. I do not accept the notion that those who make mistakes in their lives should be given an effective death sentence. Nor am I willing to stand by and allow those who are entirely innocent -- wives who, because of the culture they live in, often have no power to refuse sex with their husbands, or children who are born with the infection as a consequence of their parent's behavior -- suffer when condoms or other measures would have kept them from harm.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, Dec. 1, 2006
The radical right is so homophobic that they're blaming global warming on the AIDS quilt.
DENNIS MILLER
attributed, Quotable Queer: Fabulous Wit and Wisdom from the Gays