Quotes About Aids

George W. Bush was passionate about AIDS. And we had a 10-minute talk at the interval of a concert at the Kennedy Center about AIDS. And I was astonished about how well-informed he was and his commitment to AIDS. And so it's the typical thing of don't judge a book by its cover until you have read the book.

With regard to the alternatives, we already have them. The cellular and genetic lines of research in humans are the most promising. AIDS is caused by a virus, so it makes sense to study the virus, not chimpanzees. We have learned virtually nothing about AIDS from the chimpanzee. Every major advance in AIDS research ... has come from human studies.

You might get AIDS in Kenya, people have AIDS, you’ve got to be careful. I mean, the towels could have AIDS.

That is supposed to be the rallying cry of women in the age of AIDS: no condom, no sex. But the dirty little secret is that the rallying cry is a whisper.... The great unspoken on the heterosexual AIDS front has been how behavior is still determined by the old psychosexual minuet of the sexes, the lack of responsibility in young men and of assertiveness in young women.

Every day we hear about the dangers of cancer, heart disease and AIDS. But how many of us realize that, in much of the world, the act of giving life to a child is still the biggest killer of women of child-bearing age?

My play Safe Sex was picked apart because critics thought it was untrue. It was a play in which no one had AIDS, but the characters talked about how it was going to change their lives.

It's hard to imagine, but we cant think of HIV/AIDS as being somebody else's story. It could be any of ours.

I think that a big part of the energy that was going into fighting AIDS was reduced when we saw that more of the new infections were among our black and brown young people. That's a sad truth to have to claim, but I believe it's true.

Our meaning is to make our little planet Earth a better place to live, to stop wars, disarm nuclear missiles, to stop diseases, AIDS, plague, cancer and to stop pollution.

I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusions that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart.

Those of us who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s have a very special spot in our heart for home-based health care.

There are two things that I put my focus on. One is the fight against AIDS and finding a cure. The other is human rights.

I think it's [the AIDS fight] the most important and most pressing one - I think it's a global emergency and I think in a way we all have to address it and engage with it because I think it's the biggest threat to the human race that we have ever faced.

Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?

Actually, social drug-taking went kind of low-key for a couple of years. Probably because of AIDS, people got very conscious of their health. But it seems to be making a comeback. Just the other night I was at a party where people kept disappearing into the bathroom every few minutes. I'm glad I did all that in my 20s and that I'm done with it. And that I wrote about it in Postcards from the Edge.

But the greatest obstacle of all to the successful prosecution of a new branch of industry in a country, in which it was before unknown, consists . . . in the bounties, premiums, and other aids which are granted, in a variety of cases, by the nations, in which the establishments to be imitated are previously introduced.

If people are encouraged to come out and say they're HIV-positive and they're given their treatments, then obviously, the people who are marginalized - like intravenous drug users, prisoners, people are made to feel less-than - if they're given the support of the government, and they're given the funding, then it's going to help solve the spread of AIDS and HIV in America.

HIV infection and AIDS is growing - but so too is public apathy. We have already lost too many friends and colleagues.

The world economy, the world environment, the world AIDS crisis, the world arms race: they affect us all.

AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.

Do we now fight for the kind of passionate belief that I have about sexuality, about the importance of the erotic, of people actually getting to fulfill desire and not be punished because they have it? No, we're nowhere near close to that. We're dealing with an AIDS epidemic that continues out of control globally and in this country, NO, THIS IS NOT the movement that I am fighting to create. Has it succeeded in places that are very significant? Yes it has - and it would be foolish to say that those things don't matter.

Most recently my battle has been against AIDS and the discrimination surrounding it.

It will kill four times as many Americans as AIDS will over the next decade. I feel that what ever kind of disability God has given me, as an entertainer and as a public figure, it is so I can be a representative for others.

We must encourage people to get educated, to get tested, to get involved in the fight against AIDS.

Many of the medicines we use today, to fight everything from AIDS to cancer, originate as a toxin in an amphibian skin. When we lose these animals, we lose resources. We lose keystone species in the environments where they live.

We have hearing aids in order to fix our ears. We have lasik surgery in order to fix our eyes. People ... you can't fix stupid!

[AIDS ] is not a short-term emergency but it is something that, just like smallpox was many decades ago, we should aim for complete eradication.

One does nothing who tries to console a despondent person with word. A friend is one who aids with deeds at a critical time when deeds are called for.

I think these last 10 years have seen just a huge shift in the psyche of this country as regards gay people. I think AIDS had a lot to do with it. So many families who really believed they'd 'never met one' were suddenly confronted with their sons becoming ill, and friends of sons. I think that brought a lot of it into the open.

The film was made in 1973. It was a golden time for people to experiment without risking, for example, AIDS. Today one has to be so much more careful and I don't think a character like that could exist now.

Just to be clear, if, like Pat Robertson, you somehow missed all the evidence, all the research, the depth and breadth of all the knowledge garnered about HIV and AIDS over the past three decades, you cannot get HIV if you share towels.

For all the feminist jabber about women being victimized by fashion, it is men who most suffer from conventions of dress. Every day, a woman can choose from an army of personae, femme to butch, and can cut or curl her hair or adorn herself with a staggering variety of artistic aids. But despite the Sixties experiments in peacock dress, no man can rise in the corporate world today, outside the entertainment industry, with long hair or makeup or purple velvet suits.

The mandalas were meant to be objects of contemplation, aids to meditation, their proportions magically balanced to purify and calm the mind. To stare at a mandala was to experience, if only briefly, the nothingness that is at the heart of enlightenment.

But until we get rid of that shame, then people are going to stay underground, they are not going to get tested, and we're facing an uphill battle [with AIDS].

Christianity was created by some decadent and degenerated Romans as a tool of oppression, in the late Roman era, and it should be treated accordingly. It is like handcuffs to the mind and spirit and is nothing but destructive to mankind. In fact I don't really see Christianity as a religion. It is more like a spiritual plague, a mass psychosis, and it should first and foremost be treated as a problem to be solved by the medical science. Christianity is a diagnosis. It's like Islam and the other Asian religions, a HIV/AIDS of the spirit and mind.

The moral immune system of this country has been weakened and attacked, and the AIDS virus is the perfect metaphor for it. The malignant neglect of the last twelve years has led to breakdown of our country's immune system, environmentally, culturally, politically, spiritually and physically.

When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy.

It's simply the way things are when people come together out of hurt rather than happiness. When you try to use people as band-aids you merely reinfect the wound, and every moment you spend with them is like a speck of glass working itself deeper into your flesh.

Great sadness can be off putting, hard to comprehend, especially if it hasn't been your experience. It's amazing for me to know now that AIDS, for instance, is something a lot of people don't "get," whereas it entirely shaped my social life since the time I was twenty until I was almost forty.

Knowing is different from doing and therefore theory must never be used as norms for a standard, but merely as aids to judgment.

From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.

You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.

It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.

Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.

Wouldn't it be great if you could only get AIDS by giving money to television preachers?

If Carter had been there when the AIDS crisis came up, it would have been a whole different story. It could have been treated like a legitimate disease.

Well, talking about Ethiopia is like talking about the whole continent. A month ago we played against AIDS and famine. We also played in Dakar. It is not only the music which is playing an important role on this issue of problems affecting Africa, but the activities of doctors, sportsmen and journalists are also helping in various ways.

We had the 60s sexual revolution, and now people are dying of AIDS.