Best 444 quotes in «autism quotes» category

There's a saying within the Asperger community: if you've met one person with Asperger's syndrome, you've met one person with Asperger's syndrome ... Within this condition, beneath this label, the variety of personality, of humor, of behavior, is infinite.

There's no black and white dividing line between a mild Aspergers, which is the mild autism, and computer engineer, for example.

There tends to be a lot of autism around the tech centers... when you concentrate the geeks, you're concentrating the autism genetics.

The risks are far greater to your child of not getting immunized than any kind of speculative potential relationship between the vaccine and the development of autism.

These diagnostic profiles like depression, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, it's half science and the other half is a committee of doctors bickering over what it should be, and it has changed. It's not precise like a diagnosis of tuberculosis would be very precise.

The thing is, autism is a big spectrum. Going from folks who remain nonverbal, all the way up to, ya know, famous scientists and musicians. And we've got to work on strengths. We also have to work on teaching basic manners and skills.

The truth can finally be told: Donald Trump's autism was caused by a vaccination that went terribly wrong; this explains why he can't relate to other people.

They claim that autism naturally occurs at about 18 months, when the MMR is routinely given, so the association is merely coincidental and not causal. But the onset of autism at 18 months is a recent development. Autism starting at 18 months rose very sharply in the mid-1980s, when the MMR vaccine came into wide use. A coincidence? Hardly!

Together, we’ll beat autism.

Though Autism can be frightening and terribly demanding, it also comes with its vast share of superpowers that are unknown to the typical human.

This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.

Those outside of autism need to understand this is an epidemic and we need more government funding, insurance coverage and education reform.

We've got to learn from each other. We have to put ourselves out there, we want to pull the other up because we want/should pull the other line up as we all have strengths and weaknesses and together we make a stronger group, family, community, world. And so it becomes a beautiful idea that can be practiced in that dealing with a person with autism can be...It's just different. It's not weird.

To measure the success of our societies, we should examine how well those with different abilities, including persons with autism, are integrated as full and valued members.

Vaccines are extremely well tested; their safety is well understood. The false allegations about vaccines causing autism have been disproven. But there are still echoes out there confusing people.

We have learned that a majority of parents whose children have late-onset or acquired autism believe it is vaccine-related. They deserve answers. We have also learned that the parents have been our best investigators in looking for both causes of autism and for treatments.

We can either continue to collectively stand on the sidelines and debate what is causing autism and if it is an epidemic or we can get on the field and start addressing the real problem - a generation of children with autism. We are not focusing enough on prevention, treatments and support services.

What is missing from today's dialogue is the effect autism is having on families, our society and what the unknown factors are. The 300lb. gorilla in the room is that our children with autism today will soon become adults with autism.

When we come to research, if we want to find out the cause of autism, we're going to have to be much more specific, and that's why when it comes to research, I'm fairly strict with respect to criteria. When it comes to treatment, I'm much more open to not making that differentiation.

Yes some people say ignorant things about autism but silencing them solves nothing. They need to be educated. That's how things change.

When you take a drug to treat high blood pressure or diabetes, you have an objective test to measure blood pressure and the amount of sugar in the blood. It is straight-forward. With autism, you are looking for changes in behavior.

William Stillman continues his fascinating exploration of the myriad connections between autism and human personality. The Soul of Autism makes a strong case for why we should embrace rather than fear the differences between us.

Without intervention today, the cost of care for adults with autism will be significantly greater and the burden will no longer lie with the parents, but on our entire society.

William Stillman's Autism and the God Connection is a sensitive and illuminating work which could dramatically change how we view autism.

Without a doubt in my mind, I believe that vaccinations triggered Evan's autism.

You are the most brave intrepid person I have ever known, and you have dedicated your life to helping those who are misunderstood and underrepresented.

A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on (Charles Haddon Spurgeon)

You take somebody - one person has definitely got autism, you got another person that maybe has some of those traits and maybe there's some anxiety, depression, some epilepsy or something in the family history. Put them together, you're more likely to have a severely autistic kid than if you don't have any neurological problems in the family history.

...ABA doesn't aim to offer neuroqueer children new repertoires of meaning. To smile isn't to signify one's contentment; it's to comply with a behavioral and prosocial demand.

ABA never promised that it could make children normal. Just indistinguishable from normal.

Adapting our own perception, following rather than leading and building bridges are all keys to helping the child with autism learn.

After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.

All people, whether Aspie or neuro-typical are predisposed by their society to make guesses, jump to conclusions and then seek to defend those conclusions, regardless of logic or changing circumstance. This is sloppy, illogical thinking which may not hinder your life too much, under normal circumstances. But if you want to be a great detective, then such thinking will absolutely ruin your chances.

Also I didn't habe 20/20 vision whch you needed to be a pilot. But I said you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

Always be true to yourself and live your best life.

And I think for a moment, because people don't actually ask that very often. They tell me what they think I feel because they've read it in books, or they say incredible things like "autistic people have no sense of humour or imagination or empathy" when I'm standing right there beside them (and one day I'm going to point out that that is more than a little bit rude, not to mention Not Even True) or they -- even worse -- talk to me like I'm about five, and can't understand. "It's like living with all your senses turned up to full volume all the time," I say. "And it's like living life in a different language, so you can't ever quite relax because even when you think you're fluent it's still using a different part of your brain so by the end of the day you're exhausted.

Among people who have autism and speech challenges, I think there will always be individuals whose “verbal blocks” come from the same place as mine. They too, I believe, can unlock language by referencing common points between memory scenes and the moment they’re in. This might take a great deal of practice, but their family, helpers and teachers mustn’t give up on them. The person with special needs will sense that resignation, lose their motivation and stop trying to speak. This can erode even their will to live. Believe me. Communication is the person, to a major degree. Please don’t be the first to walk away.

...and even now I still can't "do" a real conversation. I have no problem reading books aloud and singing, but as soon as I try to speak with someone, my words just vanish.

An inability, or reduced ability, to empathise is not the same as an inability to love. Love is a powerful feeling for another person, often defying logic.

And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building. I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.

Are we allowing individuals to develop their talents with our current teaching methods? Is there more or maybe less we should be doing?

Any given therapy method might well work to some degree for some people with autism, but no approach will work across the board for every person with the condition.

Are the kids at school mean?” “Not mean, exactly. I’d say that the way they treat me is peculiar. More like I’m a zoo animal than a person.” A fist bounced against her leg. “I figured it out when I was visiting a primates exhibit once. People were staring at the gorilla, wondering what he would do next, hoping to be fascinated or creeped out. When he did something gross, they gasped and leaned closer. But when nothing more happened, they got bored and walked off.” The fist-thumping ended. “All the gorilla wanted was to be left alone. Instead, he was caged and made to entertain people against his will. I felt sorry for him until I reaized the cage protected him. Then I was jealous.

As autumn comes around the year's corner, the cicadas' lives come to an end. Human beings still have plenty of time in store, but we who have autism, who are semi-detached from the flow of time, we are always uneasy from sunrise to sunset. Just like cicadas, we cry out, we call out.

Art can permeate the very deepest part of us, where no words exist.

A rising tower of wood and needles and branches and great slabs of bark that has grown for hundreds of years. An impossible castle made from air and sunlight, fixed in place by the power of photosynthesis and chlorophyll. Magic. With lights.

As a boy, Picasso struggled with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Einstein was slow to talk and would apply picture thinking to complex problems in the field of physics. The dividing line between psychiatric disorders and great gifts is often a very narrow one and strongly depends on how someone is viewed by their surroundings.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no need whatsoever to “practice being bullied.” Acquiring superpowers of endurance is not something children need to be learning before they enter society at large. It is only the person being bullied who understands the true cost of what they suffer. People with no experience of being bullied have no idea how miserable it is to grow up being picked on the whole time.

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.

As soon as [Patricia Highsmith] had stopped work, she felt purposeless and quite at a loss about what to do with herself. 'There is no real life except in working,' she wrote in her notebook, 'that is to say in the imagination.' It was in this state that she observed that only one situation would drive her to commit murder - being part of a family unit. Most likely, she thought, she would strike out in anger at a small child, felling them in one blow. But children over the age of eight, she surmised, would probably take two blows to kill. The reality of socialising with anyone, no matter how close, she said, left her feeling fatigued.