Top 33 Parkinson Quotes

I have been able to have a family and to dedicate quality time to my two sets of twins and my husband, as well as to serve on the boards of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and Montefiore Medical Center.

As I got older, I got Parkinson’s disease, so I couldn’t sing at all. That’s what happened to me. I was singing at my best strength when I developed Parkinson’s. I think I’ve had it for quite a while.

I started out as a neurologist. I then trained in neuropathology and was focused on neurodegeneration. So, for years, I studied Alzheimer’s, aging, Parkinson’s, that kind of thing.

I miss singing every day. I can’t sing anymore. My voice doesn’t work. I have Parkinson’s disease, and it sometimes takes my words away from me.

I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson’s. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there’s freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn’t have otherwise found myself in.

The most important thing is to bring people with Parkinson’s into our world and for the public to have a real understanding of it, as they’re beginning to have with autism.

I take the medication for myself so I can transact, not for anyone else. But I am aware that it is empowering for people to see what I do and, for the most part, people in the Parkinson’s community are just really happy that Parkinson’s is getting mentioned, and not in a pitying way.

So what I say about Tracy is this: Tracy’s big challenge is not having a Parkinson’s patient for a husband. It’s having me for a husband. I happen to be a Parkinson’s patient.

If you asked my kids to describe me, they’d go through a whole list of words before even thinking about Parkinson’s. And honestly, I don’t think about it that much either. I talk about it because it’s there, but it’s not my totality.

My goals over the decade include to develop new drugs to treat intractable diseases by using iPS cell technology and to conduct clinical trials using it on a few patients with Parkinson’s diseases, diabetes or blood diseases.

I want Alzheimer’s. I want Lou Gehrig’s disease. I want Parkinson’s. I want Huntington’s. I want to be the face and voice of all these neurological traumas. I want them all.

At the beginning of my career, as a boy from Peru in London, suddenly discovering British culture and society, I looked so much at the work of the photographers Cecil Beaton and Norman Parkinson, which seemed to represent a wonderful vanished grandeur of my new country.

Parkinson’s is a slow but inevitable process. It’s hard living with it on a daily basis. The difficulty facing people with it is that they never quite know ‘Can I or can’t I do this today?’

In addition to relieving patient suffering, research is needed to help reduce the enormous economic and social burdens posed by chronic diseases such as osteoporosis, arthritis, diabetes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, cancer, heart disease, and stroke.

Technology challenges us to look at our human values. We can try to use technology to cure Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, which would be a blessing, but that blessing is not a reason to move from artificial brain enhancement to artificial intimacy.

The moment I understood this – that my Parkinson’s was the one thing I wasn’t going to change – I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research is funded.

You’ve probably read in People that I’m a nice guy – but when the doctor first told me I had Parkinson’s, I wanted to kill him.

Stem cell research is the key to developing cures for degenerative conditions like Parkinson’s and motor neuron disease from which I and many others suffer. The fact that the cells may come from embryos is not an objection, because the embryos are going to die anyway.

Parkinson’s is very hard to diagnose. So when I finally went to a neurologist, and he said, ‘Oh, you have Parkinson’s disease,’ I was completely shocked.

Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, brain and spinal cord disorders, diabetes, cancer, at least 58 diseases could potentially be cured through stem cell research, diseases that touch every family in America and in the world.

I didn’t know why I couldn’t sing – all I knew was that it was muscular or mechanical. Then, when I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I was finally given the reason. I now understand that no one can sing with Parkinson’s disease. No matter how hard you try. And in my case, I can’t sing a note.

Traditionally, when you talk to people who have Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, they’ll talk about how they’re in five or six studies, and they’ve been sequenced by each study. That’s just fat in the system. Just have a single data set that then you can share. You can make the entire system more efficient.

A family is definitely in my future, but I have no idea when. I don’t know how people fit it in with an acting career, but they do. Katherine Parkinson is a great example of that, so I’ll have to ask her.

In fact, Parkinson’s has made me a better person. A better husband, father and overall human being.

I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart.’ My mother was an exception to this rule and was punished by the early onset of Parkinson’s disease.

By the age of 13, I knew I wanted to be a comedian like Morecambe and Wise. So, obviously, I thought I’d better start practising my interviews for Parkinson. Don’t look shocked – I wasn’t the only teenager to imagine that. Though I may have been the only one to have chosen T’Pau as my walk-on music.

In a prime-time address, President Bush said he backed limited federal funding for stem cell research. That’s right, the President said, this is a quote, the research could help cure brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and whatever it is I have.

Inflammation is the cornerstone of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis – all of the neurodegenerative diseases are really predicated on inflammation.

I have a form of Parkinson’s disease, which I don’t like. My legs don’t move when my brain tells them to. It’s very frustrating.

We have common enemies today. It’s called childhood poverty. It’s called cancer. It’s called AIDS. It’s called Parkinson’s. It’s called Muscular Dystrophy.

You can have a very bad end with Parkinson’s, but on the other hand, you can be like me, because I’m lucky. I’m not having a bad end.

Katherine Parkinson has got a classics degree from Cambridge yet is an idiot – in the best possible way.

We have lost close friends and relatives to cancer and Parkinson’s disease, and the level of personal suffering inflicted on patients and their families by these diseases is horrific.