Top 170 AIDS Quotes

Those who have come into Formula One without experiencing cars devoid of electronic aids will find it tough. To control 800 horse power relying just on arm muscles and foot sensitivity can turn out to be a dangerous exercise.

AIDS itself is subject to incredible stigma.

To tell you the truth, I’m shocked, as I travel across this country, at how little people know or don’t want to know about HIV/AIDS. There are a lot of people who don’t know that HIV is one thing and AIDS is another. Those people just think it’s one big old alphabet of a disease.

Being in the design industry, I’ve tended to meet more people who are affected by HIV and AIDS.

I remember the ’80s being about the Cold War and Reagan and the homeless problem and AIDS. To me, it was kind of a dark, depressing time.

You’ve got to watch the politics of AIDS. The politics of AIDS can work both for and against the victims of AIDS.

It is my mission to ensure that HIV-positive children and children with AIDS are no longer overlooked and that they begin receiving the treatment and care they deserve.

In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, ‘I have just lost the love of my life.’

AIDS is a complex situation that’s sure to bring out the best and the worst in people.

Most of my friends are dead. I watched friends die in my arms at 5, 6, 8. When I grew up, the rest of my friends died of AIDS.

But it is true that sometimes an enveloping darkness aids one to clearer vision; as in a panorama building, for example, where the obscurity about the entrance prepares one better for the climax, and gives the scene depicted a more real and vivid appearance.

My son has died of AIDS.

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

As of 2013, according to the World Health Organization, 35 million people were estimated to be living with HIV or AIDS globally, and 39 million have died from the disease. The epidemic of denial won, and now everyone knows there is money in the making of drugs for AIDS.

The message has become clearer to the nation about AIDS. People used to think they could catch it all kinds of ways, but we now know that it is absolutely passed through bodily fluids.

Watching AIDS play its evil game of give and take has made me understand why lobbying for increased research funding should be an urgent priority – not only for the gay community but for us all.

When people have hearing loss, I think they often take that burden and pass it on to their friends and family, and we make them scream and yell at us so we can hear! But I think it’s better to take responsibility and wear hearing aids!

Anything that has a relationship with pleasure, we reject it. Eating, they talk about cholesterol; making love, they talk about AIDS; you talk about smoking, they talk about cancer. It’s a very sick society that rejects pleasure.

One thing I can take credit for, along with the rest of show business, is when the red ribbons were out, we cured AIDS. Any advancements that came towards fighting AIDS were not done by scientists or doctors – it was people with little ribbons on their lapels.

The AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about.

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.

The advent of AIDS circa 1980 has really forced medicine and biology to take enormous steps just for sheer survival. The same way war propels hard technology, AIDS has created wartime conditions in the field of biology that will have all sorts of spin-offs.

People with AIDS, cancer and other illnesses need free nonmedical support services.

The male elites that run most countries are exceedingly uncomfortable with the subject of AIDS because it’s a sexually transmitted disease.

Those who say that climate change doesn’t exist are being understood as the flat-earthers that they are, as the people who deny the link between smoking and cancer, as the people who denied the link between HIV and AIDS.

At the time I made ‘Safe,’ I was really intrigued by the whole culture around AIDS, which was turning to people like Louise Hay and these other West Coast New Age thinkers.

I believe Aids is the most important issue we face, because how we treat the poor is a reflection of who we are as a people.

Any charity that aids or supports trying to find a cure for cancer is very close to my heart. My mom had cancer multiple times, so it’s something that I can relate to.

Alcoholism and country music are both tremendous aids to self-dramatisation.

I can remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s how many men with AIDS I saw everywhere in Key West. There were hospices and medical supply stores geared to people with AIDS. It seemed that every sick man who could afford it had headed for the warmth and the tranquillity and the gay-friendliness of the island.

I’d worked for, during one period, for a PR firm, and for a while Rock Hudson was a client of ours, so I knew him well, and I knew when he had AIDS, that he had AIDS, but I would not write about that.

I believe UNAIDS’ provocative leadership has been critical in addressing the AIDS epidemic and converting it from a death sentence to a chronic health condition.

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

Dad could speak with a strong voice. And luckily, he was very good at lip-reading, so he was able to disguise his deafness well. He tried various hearing aids but would find them fiddly and uncomfortable, and worse, they often made horrible high-pitched noises.

Diarrhea, 90 percent of which is caused by food and water contaminated by excrement, kills a child every fifteen seconds. That’s more than AIDS, malaria, or measles, combined. Human feces are an impressive weapon of mass destruction.

You can’t stigmatize people, you can’t cut away people you admire just because they suffer AIDS. It’s just not right.

Particularly conservative Christians, I was very angry that they were not involved more in the AIDS emergency.

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.

The president recognizes that funding global health is good for national security, domestic health and global diplomacy. Consequently, President Obama has steadily increased funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which was created by President Bush and has strong bipartisan support.

AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.

We’ve taken on the major health problems of the poorest – tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria – in four countries. We’ve scored some victories in the sense that we’ve cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.

Questions have also arisen about AIDS being transmitted to hemophiliacs via blood transfusions.

If we stop exploring space, we’re going to lose the same part of us that found vaccines and penicillin, the part that searches for cures to cancer and AIDS.

I’m grateful for doing those drugs, because they kept me from getting laid and I would have gotten AIDS.

Because I found myself telling the story of his family to people without the visual aids that I was able to employ by filming them eventually. But I very much knew exactly what I was going to do.

I grew up using hearing aids, and I had speech therapy and so forth, and that helped me to develop a passion for music and helped me to develop my drumming talents.

I took the test for AIDS. I began to hate people who were not sick. Those people are monsters, I would think, believing that they are well because of moral superiority, because they are good. I identified with the loneliness of the sick. I felt that there was something pure about them.

I walk out of my apartment, and St. Vincent’s is standing there like a ghost ship. That was the ground zero of AIDS in New York: a conservative institution that quickly adapted to its unconventional patients and made heroic efforts to try and save them.

When I was losing my hearing, we had to buy hearing aids and they were incredibly expensive. It was a huge financial situation.

I was destined to work with dying patients. I had no choice when I encountered my first AIDS patient. I felt called to travel some 250,000 miles each year to hold workshops that helped people cope with the most painful aspects of life, death and the transition between the two.

I think we all realize that anyone can – and has – gotten AIDS. So there’s obviously still a lot to be done.

AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion… It’s, what, a few months in Iraq.

AIDS win be our first priority, but in two years’ time we don’t know where AIDS research will stand, so we are also thinking of activity on other diseases.

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.

The hearing aids are very helpful for speech reading. Without the hearing aids, my voice becomes very loud, and I cannot control the quality of my voice.

When AIDS first appeared, people didn’t know what it was. You’ll remember that it affected mostly young gay men – it was actually called GRID for a short period of time: Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome – and people thought it actually might be recreational drugs or other types of toxins.

Pandemics do not occur randomly. From malaria and influenza to AIDS and SARS, the lethal microbes have come, in the first instance, from animals, especially wild animals. And we increasingly know which parts of the world pose the greatest risk for future incursions.

I go to this gym full of stunt men. There aren’t any TVs or treadmills there. This is a spit-and-sawdust kind of place. It has a lot of great training aids – trampolines and bags and every weapon ever invented to do harm to a human being. If you want to know how to throw a knife, it’s great.

Peter Jennings came to us and said to make a PSA, ‘Let’s Talk About AIDS.’ But I was naive about how the virus is contracted – until Magic Johnson came out. I’d stereotyped it, thinking it was a gay disease, a white man’s disease.

The discovery of HIV in 1983 and the proof that it was the cause of AIDS in 1984 were the first major scientific breakthroughs that provided a specific target for blood-screening tests and opened the doorway to the development of antiretroviral medications.

I’m not really religious but very spiritual. I give money to this company that manufactures hearing aids on a regular basis. More people should really hear me sing. I have a gift from God.

I tell people that if I’m ignoring them, chances are I may not have heard them. I depend on hearing aids, but I’ve not found it a problem. I’m visually very aware!

I always say to people that Zimbabweans are the funniest people in Africa; we even laugh at funerals. And it’s true. I mean, there are so many jokes about funerals. There are so many jokes about AIDS. We find ways of coping with pain by laughing at it and by laughing at ourselves.

I have great trouble with the people who envision AIDS as a punishment from God.

90 percent of the cost of malaria drugs has come down because of the work of the Clinton Foundation. There are over 10 million people around the globe today receiving life-saving HIV and AIDS drug treatments because of the Clinton Foundation.

All our friends – so many friends are gay or lesbian and transgender. We’re just in that world. We all went through the devastating time of the AIDS crisis, and I think that galvanized us to be more activists – AIDS activists.

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 just feel I’ve got thousands and thousands of young fans that have to learn about what’s real when it comes to AIDS.

When the AIDS epidemic broke, because I happened to be a science nerd and knew a lot about viruses and a lot about that virus at the time, I felt a moral obligation to go out and try to stem the fear and get out and explain to people what the disease was and how it worked.

The school I was going to said they had no guidelines for a person with AIDS.

There’s no question that the gay movement would not be as far along as it is without AIDS. But how can there be any other issue in the face of death, possible extinction?

I have serious hearing loss. I’m challenged if I don’t have my hearing aids in.

Small aids to individuals, large aid to masses.

The global commitment for the Sustainable Development Goals offers a profound opportunity to tackle the structural, social, and economic changes needed to end AIDS.

My own child, one of them, died of AIDS. A brilliant boy.

I started a list of all my friends who had died of AIDS, and I stopped at 78. I think about things like that, and I’m just real glad to be here.

What better way is there to raise money for such an important organization like Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS than by celebrating all types of bodies, all types of relationships, and just acceptance overall?

My first AIDS campaign was in 1985. There was this dark cloud, everybody was socially inspired – we hadn’t seen social consciousness like that since the ’60s – but most people were talking about hunger in Africa. Nobody was talking about this really ominous circumstance here in the U.S. because of this fear of stigma.

I’ve seen things change and people forget: the history of Berlin, the history of queer struggle, the history of AIDS, the history of New York changing from an artistic powerhouse to more of a financial one now.

I was one of the first ones to participate in fundraisers for AIDS.

Like the practice of breath control, meditation on the forms of God, repetition of mantras, food restrictions, etc., are but aids for rendering the mind quiescent.

You can’t be involved in healthcare without being involved in the battle against AIDS.

We’re still leaderless. We still don’t have strong organizations that are fighting for us; there isn’t a national AIDS organization out there worth squat in my opinion.

AIDS is a horrible disease, and the people who catch it deserve compassion.

The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it, and it quickly hides itself in your genome.

There are many in the AIDS community who have said we won’t find a cure in the foreseeable future. Well, you certainly won’t find it if you’re not looking.

If we ever hope to rid the world of the political AIDS of our time, terrorism, the rule must be clear: One does not deal with terrorists; one does not bargain with terrorists; one kills terrorists.

But try if you can to support, whether it’s AIDS or the cancer foundation, so that someone else might survive, might prosper, and might actually be cured of this dreaded disease.

The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in Southeast Asia or southern Africa – from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against aids – can affect Americans. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream now.

When I started out, no one would talk to young people about HIV or AIDS. I looked around and radio looked like a powerful way to shape culture in a healthy way.

It doesn’t upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.

I learned to speak first, and then to sign. I have never really known what it was like to hear, so I can’t compare hearing aids to normal hearing.

AIDS does not inevitably lead to death, especially if you suppress the co-factors that support the disease. It is very important to tell this to people who are infected.

I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick.

Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys from time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that.

To date, nearly 100,000 Hispanics have died with AIDS. Since Hispanics are the fastest growing minority group in the United States, our challenge is even greater.

The United Nations Children’s Fund reports that more than 18 million children worldwide have lost both parents to the ravages of AIDS, starvation, war or natural disasters.

I came of age during AIDS and the terror of that and the sadness and the death and the overwhelming despair.

Epidemics historically have tended to kill the very young and the very old, but AIDS is different: Those ages 20 to 40 are most affected, which means that so far over 12 million African children have been orphaned because of AIDS.

Popular ideas about AIDS are based on a hypothesis that does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

I had seen AIDS patients in India and Africa, and knowing that people were dying even though drugs existed that could help them was shattering for me.

AIDS is a judgment we have brought upon ourselves.

I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life.

I enjoy being the messenger for God in terms of letting people know about HIV and AIDS.

We need men and women to sit down and talk to each other about sex honestly and openly. That would help us fight Aids so immediately. But our lack of communication is hugely problematic.

As for AIDS, it’s a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it’s a quarter; after that it’s a childhood disease.

Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.

Man, I loved The Smiths so much. I thought they looked awesome, and Morrissey had hearing aids like my Papaw.

For rather particular reasons, the interior-design industry moved more quickly than fashion to cope with AIDS. One reason is that it is made up of generally smaller businesses than fashion. The human losses were more quickly noticed.

I like to contribute as much as possible to some of the NGOs that I know and in the areas that I like to contribute to. These include primary health, primary education, children’s issues and AIDS.

The challenges surrounding HIV and AIDS are getting more complex and mature, and we just can’t stick our heads in the sand and say ‘it can’t happen to me.’

I lost a very dear friend who lived with AIDS for about 17 years. Rejecting early treatments that were iffy, he thought he saved himself. I really miss him a lot.

I run a modest-sized laboratory that’s looking specifically at what we call ‘the pathogenic mechanisms of HIV disease, or AIDS.’

I fight AIDS because it’s a killer disease, destroys the human race in all fields.

The bulk of my learning – if I may call it such – has come within the past three months, after I became a part of the fragile body of patients who make up an AIDS hospice. Here, surrounded by teams of supportive nurses, attentive doctors, and interns, one gently comes upon his own strengths and shortcomings.

From 1989 to 2000, I was focusing in on my children. I hadn’t realized the world had changed a lot. AIDS had happened, for starters, and so many people in the arts died or were affected.

We have miles to go to end AIDS in the Philippines and we need to equip young people with the right information and enable them to access services that are safe and responsive to their needs.

AIDS is such a scary thing and it’s also the kind of thing that you think won’t happen to you. It can happen to you and it’s deadly serious.

When I first started working with World Vision, I would sit down and talk with them about issues that concern any part of the world. MSF told me about what was going on in North Korea. I also support AIDS and breast cancer charities.

Early in 1986, the World Health Organization in Geneva still regarded AIDS as an ailment of the promiscuous few.

I asked my body if it was going to die or not from AIDS. And it said ‘no.’ I sort of paid attention to that.

Some countries that I go to are still trying to deny that it’s happening. In India, 2.1 million people are living with HIV AIDS. India manufactures most of the drugs that are used to cure HIV around the world, which is an amazing, amazing fact that most people don’t know.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

Today the biggest problem in caring for those with AIDS is no longer mainly a medical or scientific problem. The crisis is access to affordable drugs.

Too many people have already lost their lives to HIV and AIDS, and the more celebrities who can bring attention to the issue, the better.

AIDS is the biggest challenge, the major disaster facing this country and we would have wished for something more specific and far-reaching.

As a nation we should commit ourselves not only to the fight against terrorism, but to economic justice, defeat of the AIDS epidemic and vestiges of discriminatory policies of all kinds.

‘Rent’ is about a community celebrating life in the face of death and AIDS at the turn of the century.

You look at the large problems that we face – that would be overpopulation, water shortages, global warming and AIDS, I suppose – all of that needs international cooperation to be solved.

The desire to move into a bigger house, to avoid living AIDS daily, and a dream to be accepted by a community and school, became possible and a reality with a movie about my life, The Ryan White Story.

You can’t get AIDS from a hug or a handshake or a meal with a friend.

Give a child love, laughter and peace, not AIDS.

I actually came out the year that AIDS hit the front pages. So there was this mixed feeling about it – excitement that life’s finally begun, but it was completely tied up with mortality and danger and politics.

Because of the lack of education on AIDS, discrimination, fear, panic, and lies surrounded me.

Black people do not have AIDS because AIDS is a ‘black disease’; black people are getting AIDS because most of them are immoral.

Nobody’s life is a bed of roses. We all have crosses to bear, and we all just do our best. I would never claim to have the worst situation. There are many widows, and many people dying of AIDS, many people killed in Lebanon, people starving all over the planet. So we have to count our lucky stars.

I went to Africa without the perspective of a balance between teaching people the truth, which has been my calling, and helping people who have physical problems, like AIDS and orphans and hunger.

I don’t think I could compare myself to Macaulay Culkin, because we’re pretty much two different kinds of actors. He’s done a lot of comedy. He does mostly just comedy like ‘Uncle Buck’ and ‘Home Alone’ and ‘Home Alone 2.’ And I’ve done a lot of different stuff, like sad movies, like the movie about the kid with AIDS.

United Nations peacekeepers are going all over the world spreading AIDS even while they’re trying to bring peace. What a supreme irony.

In the 1980s we had the huge catastrophe of AIDS and you would walk down the street and see someone who was dying. It was horrendous.

Every time a person sacrifices himself for a larger injustice, it aids in the cycle of change.

George W. Bush is very popular in Sub-Saharan Africa. Why? Because of PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief.

By the way, what happened to our surgeon general who warned us about AIDS and smoking? That position has been completely stripped of power.

I’m particularly proud of my work with the Starkey Hearing Foundation for whom I raised a million dollars in one day on ‘Celebrity Apprentice.’ They do great work around the world helping deaf children in developing countries get proper attention and free hearing aids.

Africa the continent is not just what we see on the news. It’s… not AIDS, and it’s not just war and poverty. It’s so much more. It’s an abundant continent, and Botswana is an abundant place.

How is AIDS research to progress when the premise of science is questioning but the premise of questioning HIV is considered so dangerous that even venturing into the facts is too great a risk?

When I work out, I wear two in-the-ear hearing aids for comfort, and then I wear the behind-the-ears for my day-to-day non-physical activities, when I need maximum hearing and to communicate with people and do interviews!

Hearing aids didn’t cause any problem with my social life, my career, no problem at all, and I’ve been wearing them for a long time. As a matter of fact, once I became an entertainer and started working on television, I was probably the first performer to talk about hearing problems on the air.

I lost relatives to AIDS, a couple of my closest cousins. I lost friends to AIDS, high-school friends who never even made it to their 21st birthdays in the ’80s. When it’s that close to you, you can’t really deny it, and you can’t run from it.

It’s wonderful that so many people want to contribute to fighting aids or malaria. But, if somebody isn’t paying attention to the overall health system in the country, a whole lot of money can be wasted.

The trouble is it’s very difficult to pin-point the most important thing because Aids affects everyone in different levels of society, differently and you have to respond to it differently.

I have covered wars, before the epidemic began and since. They are all ugly and painful and unjust, but for me, nothing has matched the dread I felt while walking through the Castro, the Village, or Dupont Circle at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

My friends were dropping like flies, and the government wasn’t doing anything. You don’t watch an entire generation take water hoses and dogs on the front line during the ’60s or watch another generation perish from AIDS and then get to drive around in big cars and do nothing.

When I started the radio program in 1981, not many people were talking about sexuality. Not many people were talking about AIDS or HIV.

The FDA first began prohibiting gay and bisexual men from donating blood in the early 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, when the risk from blood transfusion was just beginning to be understood. In the decades to follow, the ‘lifetime ban’ was left largely unchanged.

I think AIDS can be won. I think we can win this fight. It is winnable. But it means behavior change.

The AIDS epidemic began before I was born – I’ve never known a world without it. And yet, despite its omnipresence in our lives, there remains a pervasive silence around AIDS among young people, particularly young women.

I had a calling inside of me. I had a sense that when I was going through experiences like living on the streets, losing my parents to AIDS, just having my whole world turned upside-down, there was this feeling inside of me like I was meant for something greater.

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.

The term ‘new queer cinema’ and the films of mine that were associated with that term are from a very, very different time, one almost entirely defined by the AIDS era. It was a very different social and cultural regard for the lives, the experiences, the worth of gay people.

AIDS is a very, very, very vicious disease, particularly in the black community.

You don’t want to hear about how much money I donate to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America or to AIDS awareness or to give out scholarships. You don’t want to hear about that.

The pandemic of AIDS is a gender-based disease.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

World Aids Day is both a day of remembrance and a day of hope.

In 1995, Glaxo bought Burroughs Wellcome and became the presumptive leader in AIDS therapy.

The part in ‘Philadelphia’ where I represent the law firm that’s firing Tom Hanks, that was a hard part for me because I lost one of my best friends to AIDS, and it was hard for me to play a part that wasn’t sympathetic to someone with AIDS.

We fill our lives with all sorts of things that make it easier for us to get along in the world: wheelchairs, crutches, grabber sticks, hearing aids, canes, guide dogs, modified vehicles, ramps, as well as other kinds of services and supports. Disability does not necessarily mean dependence on other people.

In the ’70s, the gay movement was really making strides. Huge strides. And then AIDS came along and slapped a judgment on it all and the Right Wing religious movement was like, ‘See. This is why, we told you.’ And it pushed back the movement 30 years.

My mother’s brother became the undersecretary of the interior for Nixon, which did cause a little drama in my family because I was going to riots and everything, but he turned out great and gave us a nice cheque for an AIDS benefit we had for the ‘Serial Mom’ premiere.