Russell McOrmond > Russell's Quotes

“Effectively ruining oneself just to provide absence of annoyance or inconvenience to others in exchange for their allowance of your continued basic existence is not an optimal outcome for anyone involved.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“Before 9/11, I thought that tragedy had the potential to connect us with humanity in ways that prosperity does not. I thought that if prosperity tends to isolate, tragedy must connect. Now I realize that this is not always the case. One unfortunate response to tragedy is a self-righteousness about one’s own condition, a seeking proof of one’s special place in the world, even in victimhood. One afternoon, I shared these thoughts with a new colleague, the Israeli vice chancellor of the Budapest-based Central European University. When he told me that he was a survivor of Auschwitz, I asked him what lesson he had drawn from this great crime. He explained that, like all victims of Auschwitz, he, too, had said, “Never again.” In time, though, he had come to realize that this phrase lent itself to two markedly different conclusions: one was that never again should this happen to my people; the other that it should never again happen to any people. Between these two interpretations, I suggest nothing less than our common survival is at stake.”
― Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror

“am candid and forthright: I can only speak the truth as I see it. It doesn’t occur to me that your default preference is to be lied to and shielded from the truth. Who wants that? My openness and directness have never matched society’s rules and expectations, and so I have spent most of my life frustrating, offending or unknowingly pushing people away.”
― Orion Kelly, Autism Feels ...: An Earthling's Guide

“We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?”
― David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

“I would not change my son for the world, so I will change the world for my son.”
― Eric Garcia, We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation

“Sinclair’s lecture served as a spark for the neurodiversity movement, the concept that autism and other disabilities, like dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, and so on, are normal variations in the human population and do not require a cure but rather accommodation and acceptance.”
― Eric Garcia, We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation

“often, if disabled people somehow succeed, either our disabilities or our accommodations are questioned.”
― Eric Garcia, We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation

“People viewing their organization like a machine fail to realize that the machine parts who burn out in the workplace, both NeuroDivergent or NeuroTypical, tend to be some of the most devoted employees. Why? Because to work hard enough to burn out, you have to care about what you’re doing.”
― Lyric Rivera, Workplace NeuroDiversity Rising: NeuroDiversity = ALL Brains NeuroDivergent and NeuroTypical working together & supporting each other

“So the history of the modern state can also be read as the history of race, bringing together the stories of two kinds of victims of European political modernity: the internal victims of state building and the external victims of imperial expansion. Hannah Arendt noted this in her monumental study on the Holocaust, which stands apart for one reason: rather than talk about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Arendt sited it in the imperial history of genocide. The history she sketched was that of European settlers killing off native populations. Arendt understood the history of imperialism through the workings of racism and bureaucracy, institutions forged in the course of European expansion into the non-European world: “Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India.” Hannah Arendt’s blind spot was the New World. Both racism and genocide had occurred in the American colonies earlier than in South Africa. The near decimation of Native Americans through a combination of slaughter, disease, and dislocation was, after all, the first recorded genocide in modern history.”
― Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror

“The enemy is not the blunt adult perseverating on applied behavioral analysis (ABA) research, the enemy is not the parent wearing a puzzle piece t-shirt (but please don’t), the enemy is the system that makes it so exhausting for families to get in-home supports, it is the bias that creates inequity in IEPs, it is the administrative burden that makes county services or social security a multi-year battle. If we fight these systems from the perspective of the community as a whole then we can create a better outcome for everyone. So it’s time—I challenge everyone reading this, both parents and advocates, to put down our swords and hold ourselves accountable for what has happened in the past, but also move forward with forgiveness and humbleness. There is no shame in realizing that you were previously speaking from a less informed place, there is no shame in accepting that we have room to learn and grow still.”
― Meghan Ashburn, I Will Die On This Hill: Autistic Adults, Autism Parents, and the Children Who Deserve a Better World

“Individualism exists through disconnection, and the cost of disconnection is disconnection.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“The preservation of individualism—of either type—has historically required the suppression of less privileged voices. The unacknowledged social underpinning of both forms of individualism is caste, privilege, and exclusivity.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Fairness is a trap. Stop being centrally concerned with your rights for a moment. Stop acting like a rugged individualist, and remember the wisdom of ecology, remember your biosphere.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Once we move beyond individualistic myths like survival of the fittest, and wake up to our interdependence, it dawns on us that the willful denial of connection has consequences both to those who are denied and to the deniers. The cost of disconnection is disconnection. If us consciousness unifies, you and me consciousness fragments—our communities, our personal relationships, our very souls. As we will explore in some detail, the legacy of individualism is loneliness.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“I hate the word homophobia. It's not a phobia. You are not scared. You are an asshole.”
― Morgan Freeman

“Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants come to a place and become part of the existing political system.”
― Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future