Top 77 Wheelchair Quotes

My mother, Laura Sumner, had cerebral palsy. She was born absolutely fine, but after about three days, she started having convulsions that left her with a condition that would confine her to a wheelchair her entire life.

When FDR died in 1945, he was still paralyzed from the waist down. After he died, his portrait was put on the dime. Through his illness, he went out of his way to minimize his difficulties. Of the thousands of pictures taken of him, only two show him in a leg brace or a wheelchair.

It’s nice to have more than one little one because then you’ll have – while one is pushing you in a wheelchair, the other one can open the doors for you.

There are many role models I’ve been around, and kind of the biggest one – there’s a show called ‘Push Girls,’ with all women in wheelchairs, and they’re all really good friends of mine. And one, Angela Rockwood, is still modeling, in a wheelchair. After a car accident.

I thought my sports career was over once I got into a wheelchair. That was the hardest reality I had to face.

Disability is as visual as race. If a wheelchair user can’t play Beyonce, then Beyonce can’t play a wheelchair user.

On the first day I got my wheelchair, I was also given all my clothes for the next day, a little pile on the chair. I was so proud of myself for getting it all on – the socks and everything. Dressing is a struggle, and it can take up to an hour and a half.

I spent a lot of my infancy in hospital and actually started school in a wheelchair with this enormous plaster, and then into a surgical boot and callipers, none of which helps assimilation with other children.

Who says men don’t cry? I used to sob like a baby as I was forced to move around in a wheelchair for two months after twin surgeries on my toes.

Let me make this clear: my impairment is such that without a wheelchair, I can’t do very much for myself. I can’t get out of bed. I can’t get myself to the toilet. I certainly can’t get myself to work.

Sometimes I think I don’t want to grow old as an actress and deal with the fact that I’m getting less jobs ’cause my face is changing, and then the men… But at the same time, I’m pretty competitive. I don’t know if I’d bow out. I might still be acting when I’m in a wheelchair.

I was too big to even contemplate exercise. I had to use a walking stick and a wheelchair to get around.

I just want to get to the places I can’t get in the wheelchair, you know? I want to stand up.

At my wedding, I was dancing so furiously that I fell hard on my kneecaps. The next morning, my knees were so swollen that I had to get a wheelchair at the airport to go on my honeymoon.

I played a paraplegic on a show called ‘Neighbours.’ Just turned up on set, sat in a wheelchair. The producer came up to me one day and said, ‘We have to cut around that entire scene because your leg was moving.’

I’m a full-time wheelchair user. And yet, given the right circumstances, I am able to work.

I feel very badly about anybody that’s sick and in a wheelchair or not doing well. But you know, you have to go, ‘Life is a poker game, and we’re going to play our cards somehow.’

Equipment sellers can pocket more than $2,500 every time they send a powered wheelchair to a patient and bill Medicare.

Even now, a year later, people ask me about the Wheelchair Photo: what do I think about it? Does it bother me? The honest answer: I don’t think about it. I glanced at the photo once, about a week after the bombing. I knew immediately I never wanted to look at it again.

When I was a child, doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she already had so much scar tissue from bypass operations that the surgeons had essentially run out of plumbing. There was nothing more to do, they said; her life was over at 65.

I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won’t be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I’ll be photographing other old people.

If we see someone in a wheelchair, we assume they cannot walk. It may be that they can walk three, four, five steps. That, to them, means they can walk.

We always joke that our road crew will have to wheelchair us up onstage soon because this is what we do. This is what we love to do. This is what God put us on earth to do until the day we take our last breath.

I was told that I would be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.

The gun lobby finds waiting periods inconvenient. You have only to ask my husband how inconvenient he finds his wheelchair from time to time.

I’m pretty physically vulnerable, just being in a wheelchair.

If I can be an inspiration for someone, that’s fine, but just don’t look down on me. Don’t say, ‘Oh, you’re in a wheelchair.’

Throughout human history, some of our most influential inventors, entrepreneurs, and leaders have had disabilities. For example, Bill Gates, Sir Richard Branson, and Charles Schwab are all dyslexic, while scientist Stephen Hawking has used a wheelchair for decades.

My dad gave me my first bike at 16. I soon fell off and was in a wheelchair for weeks. I haven’t fallen since.

I firmly believe that everybody in America needs a safe place to walk or to wheelchair roll.

Melvin Guillard went to a split decision with me, he left the third round in a wheelchair. He did not walk to the back – he left in a wheelchair.

There are people I would like to work with. It’s a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I can’t really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing.

The wheelchair and the prosthesis give me a soapbox to stand on. If it helps me get my message across, I’m glad; then we need to talk about what we need to do for this country.

It’s really bad sometimes to be crippled in a wheelchair, and it reminds you that you can’t fight back when someone’s trying to rob you.

As a wheelchair user, you can’t move about freely. That’s the only thing that bothers me a little. When I’m in the Euro Group in Brussels, colleagues who want to talk to me have to come to me. But I hope they know that this has nothing to do with arrogance.

As a wheelchair user, I am utterly obsessed with toilets, and all my friends know it. A simple invitation to the pub is consistently followed by, ‘Do you know if they have an accessible toilet?’

Being competitive is in my nature. I actually think being competitive saved my life. It’s given me the constant drive to be better, and when I was in that hospital bed and that wheelchair, it made me want to get better.

The universe is an example of love. Like a tree. Like the ocean. Like my body. Like my wheelchair. I see the love.

You wouldn’t want me to play Frost in a wheelchair, would you? ‘Frost’ is getting a little long in the tooth. I still enjoy doing it, and it’s a great part, but I just think he’s got to retire.

Everyone I tell that I had an aneurysm always says, ‘Oh, my cousin died from that.’ Well, I didn’t, so I’m amazed. I was in a wheelchair, and I had to go to rehab. And now I’m walking!

My wheelchair is like the Cadillac of wheelchairs; it goes up and down and back, and I can lay down in it.

I got up from the wheelchair thanks to natural products like tulsi, aloe vera, kali mirch, and awla.

My ideal role would be a baddie in a James Bond film. I think the wheelchair and the computer voice would fit the part.

I got bullied and got pulled backwards in my wheelchair and laughed at. I was the only Black person at my school, so I was very singled out.

Today, I am a touring standup comic who cannot stand up. Within three minutes, I begin to wilt, lose my balance, and topple over. I can tap dance and run in heels, but I need to use a wheelchair to navigate airports.

I just wanted to try and overcome my condition, with a lot of people telling me I couldn’t do things and the only thing I could do was sit in my wheelchair and get bullied. Which is what I did.

My disability exists not because I use a wheelchair, but because the broader environment isn’t accessible.

I played an old woman in a wheelchair at 18.

Well, I’m using a cane, so what? So what if they shot me sitting in a wheelchair? That’s life!

I was bullied from fifth grade on. They started making fun of me because my mom was in a wheelchair, then they started making fun of me because I was poor and then it evolved to my size.

I’ve never been tall. So it’s not like I was six-foot, got paralyzed, and now I’m in a wheelchair. It doesn’t really faze me all that much.

The cost is minimal, but one of the things that you want in a universal design is to make the plan as open as you can… and to still have walls around bedrooms and that sort of thing, and to keep the corridors wide enough so the wheelchair can do a 360 in the corridor.

My bike is my gym, my wheelchair and my church all in one. I’d like to ride my bike all day long but I’ve got this thing called a job that keeps getting in the way.

I don’t want to lose my legs, you know. I don’t want to be wheeled around in a wheelchair. I don’t want to be attached to a catheter. I saw all that stuff happen to my father, and as much as it upset me because I loved my father so much, it also really traumatized me.

People aren’t familiar with wheelchair sports. The only film crew in Athens for the Paralympics was the documentary crew.

Personally, I like a generous side of wheelchair access with my cities.

I thought being in the wheelchair might be kind of limiting for me as an actor. It turned out cool in a lot of ways. Of course, at the end of the day, I can get up out of the chair and go home, but I’m very acutely aware that most people can’t, so I try to give the situation that depth.

The image of Stephen Hawking – who has died aged 76 – in his motorised wheelchair, with head contorted slightly to one side and hands crossed over to work the controls, caught the public imagination as a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter.

No one wants to live in a wheelchair unable to talk, only winking once for yes and twice for no. It’s perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way.

All of a sudden, I don’t have a leg. I’m in a wheelchair. I have half a foot; I can’t even walk to the bathroom. I’m in a bed, I can’t move, and I felt like those four walls were my prison.

I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice – if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.

Commuting in a wheelchair is not easy. I live in a very old part of Rome. These cobbles everywhere… terrible! In London, it is the same. Every pavement is uneven.

The doctors misdiagnosed me at first – they told me I had a pinched nerve. But my situation was getting worse. The tumor was cutting off the circulation in my nerves. And in two weeks’ time, I was left paralyzed. I went from a cane to crutches to a walker to a wheelchair.

I was bullied in high school. I would go through the hallways and be pointed at and laughed at because I was the new kid in a wheelchair.

My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.

I was on the wheelchair for six months and lost all hope of returning to the field. I thought my career was over, but my brother kept on encouraging me. ‘All that you need to do is to be resolute to return to the field,’ he said. These words turned out to be magical.

The people who criticise you will not be the ones taking care of your legs when you are in your wheelchair. People who never drove a car in these conditions, they just don’t know.

My father had several strokes and heart attacks. I was with him when he died, and it was a horrible death. He had been a very articulate man, and to lose that, never to be able to speak properly and to be unable to move – he had always been a very vigorous man, so to be in a wheelchair and mumbling – was terrible.

I don’t want to hang around in a wheelchair in a nursing home. I don’t. I don’t want to be like that.

There are days when my legs don’t work, so I have to be in my wheelchair.

I’ve seen Don Rickles up at the Montreal Comedy Festival. Don Rickles was doing jokes in a wheelchair, and he was headlining a show. Do you think they would let a woman do that?

A lot of the time, when people meet someone in a wheelchair, or with some disability, it’s the first thing they notice, but they don’t know how to react.

You can really do amazing things in a wheelchair. It’s very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, but you can even go up and down stairs in a wheelchair.

I have done all the work myself, not assistants. That’s why I’m in a wheelchair: I’ve been doing it physically – it’s hard labour – throughout my life.

There are days when I’m spasming to a point where I can’t even push my wheelchair because my arms aren’t working and my legs aren’t working.

The battle to find a workplace that’s wheelchair accessible is a feat in itself, let alone an employer who’s going to be cool about employing someone with a disability in a job you actually want to do.

If you want to live a hundred years, how do you want to live your life? At the age of 100, you should go shopping with your great-grandchildren, but not in a wheelchair.