Better World Quotes - AIDS Quotes

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AIDS

* "No one can lead our lives for us. We are responsible for our actions. So people—especially the younger generation---need to be very careful especially where safe sex is concerned."
-- Salman Ahmad

* “In today's climate in our country, which is sickened with the pollution of pollution, threatened with the prominence of AIDS, riddled with burgeoning racism, rife with growing huddles of the homeless, we need art and we need art in all forms. We need all methods of art to be present, everywhere present, and all the time present.”
-- Maya Angelou

* “The fight against HIV/AIDS requires leadership from all parts of government - and it needs to go right to the top. AIDS is far more than a health crisis. It is a threat to development itself.”
-- Kofi Annan

The global HIV/AIDS epidemic is an unprecedented crisis that requires an unprecedented response. In particular it requires solidarity -- between the healthy and the sick, between rich and poor, and above all, between richer and poorer nations. We have 30 million orphans already. How many more do we have to get, to wake up?"
-- Kofi Annan

* "Children who have lost parents to HIV/AIDS are not only just as deserving of an education as any other children, but they may need that education even more. Being part of a school environment will prepare them for the future, while helping to remove the stigma and discrimination unfortunately associated with AIDS."
-- Harry Belafonte

* “What is needed now are increased efforts to promote youth participation and commitment; more services aimed at youth; more parental involvement; more education and information, using schools and other sites; more protection for girls, orphaned children and young women;and more partnerships with people with HIV and AIDS.“
-- Carol Bellamy

* Everywhere I go, I see very much the same thing. I see the same compassion for people who live half a world away. I see the same concern about events beyond these borders. And, increasingly, I see the same conviction that we can and we must join together to stop the scourge of AIDS and poverty.
-- Bono

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

* "We want the world to focus on children whose lives have been devastated by AIDS. The millions of children who are missing their parents; their childhood, their future but most importantly, they are missing YOU. Everyone can make a real difference. Your voice is needed in a global movement that can change their world."
-- Pierce Brosnan (UNICEF video PSA)

* That the AIDS pandemic is threatening sustainable development in Africa only reinforces the reality that health is at the center of sustainable development.
-- Gro Brundtland

* "Every minute of every day, a child under 15 is infected with HIV - the overwhelming majority of children under 15 who are HIV-positive get infected through their mothers at birth. Without treatment, half of these children die before they reach their second birthday."
-- Gabriel Byrne

"I still cannot fathom how difficult it was for the women I met to find out that they were HIV-positive. It is such a courageous undertaking in countries where there is still considerable stigma about the disease. They got tested to ensure that their unborn babies would have a chance of life by being born free of the virus."
-- Gabriel Byrne

* "Stigma hurts. Because of AIDS, children are bullied, isolated and shut out of school. They are missing out on education. They are missing out on medicines. Children are missing your love, care and protection. Join me. And become a stigma buster. UNITE FOR CHILDREN UNITE AGAINST AIDS"
-- Jackie Chan

* “AIDS is no longer a death sentence for those who can get the medicines. Now it's up to the politicians to create the "comprehensive strategies" to better treat the disease.”
~ Bill Clinton

* "Mozambique is having an economic resurgence but still four out of 10 people there have HIV or AIDS…There's astounding conditions but what I was left with…was the power of the human spirit there and the fact these people have been through so much and they were still dancing in the streets"
~ Leonardo DiCaprio

“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.”

-- Barbara Ehrenreich

"Can we watch one-quarter of some countries' people die? Can 27 million orphans be left to fend for themselves? We may not be able to solve the entire problem today, but let us not be discouraged from taking the steps necessary to begin the journey. "
- 118 bishops of the Episcopal Church to President Bush and the US Congress, June 2001

* 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.
-- Dr. Paul Farmer

* “I spent the past week here in India getting a sense of the reality of HIV and AIDS in people’s lives. Fathers and mothers are dying, leaving children with no support. Stigma and discrimination is ruining the family lives. There is an urgent need for education, information, and increased awareness of HIV and AIDS. The response needs to be now. We cannot afford to become fatigued.”
-- Ralph Fiennes

"Education, awareness and prevention are the key, but stigmatisation and exclusion from family is what makes people suffer most"
-- Ralph Fiennes (UNICEF video PSA)

* We’re looking at the singular condition of poverty. All the other individual problems spring from that condition... doesn’t matter if it’s death, aid, trade, AIDS, famine, instability, governance, corruption or war. All of that is poverty. Our problem is that everybody tries to heal each of the individual aspects of poverty, not poverty itself.
-- Bob Geldof

* Did you know a child is orphaned by AIDS every 15 seconds. Millions of children are going it alone. Missing their childhood. Missing their mother. Missing their father. AIDS is devastating families around the globe. Children are missing your support. Unite for children. Unite against AIDS.
-- Danny Glover (UNICEF video PSA)

* Did you know children are dying because of AIDS. Missing the medicines that prevent transmission from mother to child. Missing the protection from parents teachers and role models that can teach them about the danger, and keep them safe from sexual exploitation. Children are missing your support. Unite for children. Unite against AIDS.
-- Whoopi Goldberg (UNICEF video PSA)

* The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives - and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.
~ Al Gore

* "We need to band together as a unit every day, especially to conquer the strength of the AIDS virus."
-- Dustin Hoffman

* "The songs that I've written about Africa, and AIDS and HIV and about the power of humanitarian love, those songs, I'm gonna sing them because I know that it's real."
-- India.Arie

"It's not fair that people ignore AIDS in Africa because it's Africa. It's not fair."
-- India.Arie

“I have friends of mine who have died of AIDS and many of those friends…did not tell me until the very end...because they felt that there was a stigma, a taboo, attached to it…now we have more women infected with HIV/AIDS, many of those women were infected by their husbands who did not tell them”
-- Bianca Jagger

* As a Goodwill Ambassador for YouthAIDS, I’ve learned that the face of AIDS is increasingly young and female. By educating young people and empowering them to make the right choices we can stop the spread of HIV/AIDS
-- Ashley Judd

The empowerment of girls and women is an essential tool to preventing the HIV/AIDS emergency from exploding any further
-- Ashley Judd

“Abstinence, being faithful and correct and consistent condom use are the only ways to successfully reach everyone when discussing HIV prevention. I believe that the abstinence message alone does not solve the AIDS epidemic.”
-- Ashley Judd

You have so much power to bring awareness, prevention and change.
-- Ashley Judd

* "We must work to repeal trade agreements that impede access to affordable generic drugs. We must work to cause the IMF and the World Bank to reduce and eventually eliminate the debt that takes poor nations' resources away from crises like AIDS. We must focus America's leadership on addressing and ending this epidemic."
-- Dennis Kucinich

* "Did you know knowledge is the key to stopping the spread of AIDS. Yet millions of children are missing an education. Missing their teachers who have died of the disease. Missing from class as they stay home to care for their dying mothers and fathers. Children are missing your support. Unite for Children. Unite against AIDS."
-- Jessica Lange (UNICEF video PSA)

* "It takes a variety of strategies and initiatives to address this pandemic. It's about life and death and the survival of humanity."
-- Barbara Lee

* "I've witnessed the total devastation of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa... I've met too many brave and beautiful children who are struggling to care for their sick parents or their orphaned brothers and sisters. Many children infected with HIV will not live to see their fifth birthday... Children suffer not only from this virus but also the stigma, poverty and destruction that accompany it. As a UNICEF ambassador I hope to draw more attention and funding to this crisis. The tsunami in Asia revealed the deep compassion and generosity of people worldwide. By working together and applying that same focus and support, we can protect a new generation of children from suffering."
-- Lucy Liu

“Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious.”
~ Wangari Maathai

* "Let us give publicity to HIV/AIDS and not hide it, because [that is] the only way to make it appear like a normal illness"
-- Nelson Mandela

* "Football is being used as a language in that project...The vital message being communicated to the boys and young men is about safe sex, the use of condoms and preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS."
-- Sir Roger Moore (UNICEF video PSA)

"Young people were once considered relatively safe from HIV/AIDS. “Today, their lives and futures are at risk throughout the world because of this disease. I believe it is young people throughout the world who offer us the greatest hope for defeating this deadly pandemic."
-- Liam Neeson

* "The cause of making the world a better place for children unites us all - today HIV/AIDS is the biggest threat to this one universal objective. UNICEF needs us all to help them change the world for children"
-- Liam Neeson (UNICEF video PSA)

"Investment in AIDS will be repaid a thousand-fold in lives saved and communities held together."
-- Dr. Peter Piot, Executive Director, UNAIDS

"No war on the face of the Earth is more destructive than the AIDS pandemic."
-- Colin Powell

* “When my father died of AIDS, I knew I had to do everything in my power to prevent others from going through what he endured. I support AmFAR which provides funds for cutting edge AIDS research so we can find a vaccine and a cure. ”
-- Natasha Richardson

"AIDS destroys families, decimates communities and, particularly in the poorest areas of the world, threatens to destabilize the social, cultural, and economic fabric of entire nations..."
-- Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism

* "Knowledge is the key to stopping the spread of AIDS. Yet millions of children are missing an education. Missing their teachers who have died of the disease. Missing from class as they stay home to care for their dying mothers and fathers. Children are missing your support. Unite for Children. Unite against AIDS."
-- Susan Sarandon (UNICEF video PSA)

* "As a new mother, I want to give my children the best start in life but millions of children affected with AIDS don’t live with such certainty. We can all do something to give them a future worth living for. We can make a difference in a child’s life by joining with UNICEF to ensure that mothers and children are given the treatment that they deserve, in order to live a life free from HIV and AIDS.”
-- Claudia Schiffer (UNICEF video PSA)

* “I’m a firm believer that education is the most efficient tool we have to make people aware and make our children aware, and to protect them from the scourge of the century, which is AIDS.”
-- Shakira (UNICEF video PSA)

* Like the effects of industrial pollution ... 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
-- Susan Sontag

“AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.”
-- Susan Sontag

"I believe that this could very well be looked back on as the sin of our generation...I believe that our children and their children, 40 or 50 years from now, are going to ask me, what did you do while 40 million children became orphans in Africa? "
-- Rich Stearns, President of World Vision, US

* I think the statistics of AIDS are so terrifying, so overwhelming that it makes you think that I can't act. But actually you can. You can write letters, you can activate yourself and other people. You can be aware, you can educate yourself about it and you can talk about it. And all of those things are extremely positive, even within your group - of your family and your friends. Merely raising the issue is a hugely important social and political act and people mustn't think that just because they're not shifting the world slightly to the left every time they pick up a pen. The way, I think, anything has ever really changed on this planet is through large groups of very ordinary people saying something finally.
-- Emma Thompson

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.
-- Emma Thompson

I think we're creating a situation that's incredibly dangerous. There's a lot of chat at the moment about the war on terror and whilst there are many causes for acts of terrorism, what kind of society are you creating if you allow civil society in Africa to die and create millions upon millions of orphans? Where are they going to go? What kind of cults, what kind of militias, what's going to happen? The accession of violence in those countries, the possibility of that, to me is very terrifying.
-- Emma Thompson