Autism Activists

"In this context, Hans Asperger and other medics began dividing autistics up into those deemed to have potential worth to the Third Reich given their purportedly strong logical capacities, and those who were to be sterilized or killed along with countless other mad and disabled targets."

"It was capitalism that allowed the body itself to go from being understood as a dynamic organism to being a working or broken machine. And it was not just the fact that new machines were increasingly part of daily life, making it seem natural to use machines as metaphors for the sciences of the age. It was also that the mode of production itself favored a reduction of people to living machines, since they were seen as working or broken in relation to their productive potential."

"It was in Nazi-occupied Austria that autism was coined as a diagnosis. While the term had been coined by the eugenicist and psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler in 1911, Bleuler only meant it to refer to a temporary symptom of schizophrenia. It was only under Nazi rule, in the work of Hans Asperger in the 1930s and 1940s that those who came to be called autistic were singled out as having a unique way of being. During a war where men were expected to express a 'soldier mentality' and to be part of the group, boys who failed to fit this economic requirement were singled out as pathological (it was mostly boys who got the diagnosis) and were baptized with a new name: autism. Those women who were diagnosed were also singled out if they had intellectual disabilities, since they were not seen as fit to reproduce."

"If research is society’s investment in its future, our society does not prioritize the future of autistic people."

"There's a misperception that autism is some thief in the night that takes a normal child and places an autistic child in its place. That's not true."

"In America we've spent over a billion dollars on autism research. What have we got for that? We've not seen anything that's appreciably impacted the quality of life of autistic people, regardless of their place on the spectrum. Quite frankly, we've spent $1bn figuring out how to make mice autistic and we'll spend another $1bn figuring out how to make them not autistic. And that's not what the average person wakes up in the morning aspiring to. They think: am I going to be able to find a job, to communicate, to live independently, either on my own or with support? Those are the real priorities."

"I like to say that neurotypical social interaction is a second language. It’s not as if we can’t learn it. It’s just that it doesn’t necessarily come easily to us."

"Autism is a disability insofar as we’re disabled by society. A society that is often very hostile to our ways of communicating, to our ways of being that often is structured in such a way that makes it difficult for us to access places of public accommodation and services and countless other things. It creates an education system where autistic people are often abused and do not have our communication and other needs met."

"You come out of a meeting and you've put on a mask, which involves looking people in the eye, using certain mannerisms, certain phrases. Even if you learn to do it in a very seamless sort of way, you're still putting on an act. It's a very ex-hausting act."

"My family was unaware of the autism until I was into my 20's. No one ever told them about it."

"A lot of what you see on the internet with people who claim to have autism is a very distorted and unrealistic view of what autism really is. You can spot these people by the absolute pride they have in their condition. They say autism is the best thing ever and some of them even say it places above the general population and makes them better or superior in some way."

"The bridge was built by someone who was willing to come into my world and take me into this one."

"I did not speak until I was 16. I understood everything everyone said and I would want to talk, but I just didn't know how to say it."

"Once I dreamed I'd write songs."

"Living is more or less a constant bore."

"Well, there’s one thing if I’d had a job all these years, I no doubt wouldn’t have been on Yorkshire TV’s Against All Odds programme. I wouldn’t have been on Radio 4 talking about my poems."

"One girl said I was like a Jew that sympathized with Nazis and I would gladly jump into [a] crematorium."

"Twiddling is one of my autistic things. I do it to calm me down. I twiddle frantically for a while, and I fantasize about all kinds of things while I twiddle."

"I don't have a visual imagination. Please, that trivializes my suffering. She [Temple Grandin] blows her own horn all the time."

"Usually, I was aware that other kids were bullying me, except occasionally when some girls in junior high… pretended to flirt with me and for a while. I did not understand they were making fun of me."

"Worst of all, it [speculation of notable figures] provides fodder for the special educators, special education attorneys, ABA therapists etc. to legitimize their profits and to encourage the false hope and tears for toasted snow that so many parents of these children have."

"Most persons with an autism-spectrum disorder have never expressed their opinions on someone’s blog and never will. The neurodiverse often reach a vulnerable audience, as many persons on the spectrum have low self-esteem. Neurodiversity provides a tempting escape valve."

"It's [Autism has] prevented me from making a living or ever having a girlfriend. It's given me bad fine motor coordination problems where I can hardly write. I have an impaired ability to relate to people. I can't concentrate or get things done."

"But then I got fired from so many jobs, I ended up retiring and being supported by my parents."

"On my blog I attempt to dispute these notions by pointing out their failure to consider the long-term effects of autism on high-functioning autistics such as myself—let alone what should be done for the low-functioning autistics who cannot speak, or the “headbangers.”"

"But [not accomplishing] that does not stop me from wishing for a cure for future generations of children so they will not have to live like I have."

"Hopefully on my tombstone they will write, "We don't need no stinkin’ neurodiversity"."

"Ghostwritten’s secret agenda is to offer up eight different answers to the question, "Why do things happen?" so it has the right to monkey about with time and history. number9dreams’s secret agenda is to offer eight different answers to the question, "In what space does the mind operate?""

"Courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute."

"The body is the outermost layer of the mind."

"Whoever dies with the most stuff wins."

"Lunatics are writers whose works write them."

"The most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken."

"I have always preferred maps to books. They don't answer you back."

"Perhaps the best answer is that the writer that I am has been shaped by the stammering kid that I was, and that although my stammer didn’t make me write, it did, in part, inform and influence the writer I became. It’s true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. Synonyms aren’t always neatly interchangeable. Sometimes choosing word B over word A requires you to construct a different sentence to house it—and quickly, too, before your listener smells the stammering rat."

"Right now I’m working on a book set in the thirty years on either side of 2010, but I shouldn’t give too many details or the next thing you know it’s on Wikipedia and if I change my mind and decide to recast King Lear in a pond of frogs and toads I’ll just give a hardworking Wikipedian an extra headache."

"As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens."

"What is this thing, "imagination?" A muscle that can be "forced" or "stretched"? Or something immune to the ethos of ganbaru [grit it out, or strive for one's best]? Like the relativist's view of light, it is both wave and particle, depending on what you want it to be. The verb "to imagine" is both active and passive, as in "Steve imagined his future," and "Such a future was never imagined." So, I work on my novel by imagining the world of 18th-century Nagasaki and its people and their fears and desires, as an act of will, and a lot of will is involved, believe me. However, I could ganbaru until I'm blue in the face. If my imagination doesn't work "passively" or even "intransitively," at its own behest rather than mine, and come up with cliche-demolishing twists of phrase and turns of plot and happy accidents and unexpected reactions from characters, then the book will be sterile. Well-written with luck, and even intelligent, but sterile. (...) Imagination is what makes art fertile."

"What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell."

"Autism is a neuro-developmental disorder affecting so many around the world. Autism is not mental illness, these children and adults think differently. Albert Einstein they say was autistic. How many in the audience know that there are 38,000 autistic people in Sri Lanka? So we as entertainers, urge you all to ‘speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves.’ Lets spread awareness of autism, particularly when numbers of autistic children are rising and we urge our government to also provide public services – who knows we may even produce Albert Einsteins if we provide education, health, specialist speech therapy for autistic children in our lovely island...."