Temple Grandin quotes
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I strongly recommend that students with autism get involved in special interest clubs in some of the areas they naturally excel at. Being with people who share your interests makes socializing easier.
-- Temple Grandin -
People are getting too far away from the real-world. Politics is just ridiculous, it's totally dysfunctional.
-- Temple Grandin -
The world needs different kinds of minds to work together.
-- Temple Grandin -
I'm seeing too many geeky, nerdy kids get addicted to video games and they're going nowhere. It's making me crazy.
-- Temple Grandin -
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I am different, not less
-- Temple Grandin -
I've got a lot of other people who do a lot of things for me, so I've gotten to a part in my career where I'm doing a lot of talks because I want to get kids turned on. I want to see these kids, these geeky nerdy kids, go out there and do something.
-- Temple Grandin -
The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less and less autistic, because you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave. It's like being in a play; I'm always in a play.
-- Temple Grandin -
What do I do when I go home? Work. That's basically my social life. I'm married to work.
-- Temple Grandin -
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People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet.
-- Temple Grandin -
I tend to be much more in the present and my emotions are simpler. I can be happy, I can be sad, I can be depressed, but there's a complexity that I don't have. I don't brood the same way. Fear is my main emotion.
-- Temple Grandin -
What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.
-- Temple Grandin -
I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation.
-- Temple Grandin -
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If I could snap my fingers and be nonautistic, I would not. Autism is part of what I am.
-- Temple Grandin -
People talk about curing autism. But if you got rid of all those traits, who's going to make the next computer?
-- Temple Grandin -
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of a good teacher.
-- Temple Grandin -
By looking at autistic kids, you can't tell when you're working with them who you're going to pull out, who is going to become verbal and who's not. And there seem to be certain kids who, as they learn more and more, they get less autistic acting, and they learn social skills enough so that they can turn out socially normal.
-- Temple Grandin -
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I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.
-- Temple Grandin -
I think one of the worst things schools have done is taken out all of the stuff like art, music, woodworking, sewing, cooking, welding, auto-shop. All these things you can turn into careers. How can you get interested in these careers if you don't try them on a little bit?
-- Temple Grandin -
In special education, there's too much emphasis placed on the deficit and not enough on the strength.
-- Temple Grandin -
People need to learn how to work, learn how to support themselves. I think it's just fine to be eccentric.
-- Temple Grandin -
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Nature is cruel but we don't have to be
-- Temple Grandin -
I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up - you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories.
-- Temple Grandin -
I am a big believer in early intervention.
-- Temple Grandin -
Some autistic children cannot stand the sound of certain voices. I have come across cases where teachers tell me that certain children have problems with their voice or another person's voice. This problem tends to be related to high-pitched ladies' voices.
-- Temple Grandin -
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Autism is a neurological disorder. It's not caused by bad parenting. It's caused by, you know, abnormal development in the brain. The emotional circuits in the brain are abnormal. And there also are differences in the white matter, which is the brain's computer cables that hook up the different brain departments.
-- Temple Grandin -
A treatment method or an educational method that will work for one child may not work for another child. The one common denominator for all of the young children is that early intervention does work, and it seems to improve the prognosis.
-- Temple Grandin -
You can't punish a child who is acting out because of sensory overload.
-- Temple Grandin -
I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.
-- Temple Grandin -
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I don’t want my thoughts to die with me, I want to have done something. I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution - know that my life has meaning.
-- Temple Grandin -
The worst thing you can do is nothing. (re: teaching children with autism)
-- Temple Grandin -
You simply cannot tell other people they are stupid, even if they really are stupid.
-- Temple Grandin -
The most important thing people did for me was to expose me to new things.
-- Temple Grandin -
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I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people's behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution.
-- Temple Grandin -
It's very important for the parents of young autistic children to encourage them to talk, or for those that don't talk, to give them a way of communicating, like a picture board, where they can point to a glass of milk, or a jacket if they're cold, or the bathroom. If they want something, then they need to learn to request that thing.
-- Temple Grandin -
I use my mind to solve problems and invent things.
-- Temple Grandin -
Pressure is calming to the nervous system.
-- Temple Grandin -
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You have got to keep autistic children engaged with the world. You cannot let them tune out.
-- Temple Grandin -
Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don't want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn't have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social 'yak yaks.'
-- Temple Grandin -
One of my sensory problems was hearing sensitivity, where certain loud noises, such as a school bell, hurt my ears. It sounded like a dentist drill going through my ears.
-- Temple Grandin -
There tends to be a lot of autism around the tech centers... when you concentrate the geeks, you're concentrating the autism genetics.
-- Temple Grandin -
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If you start using a medication in a person with autism, you should see an obvious improvement in behavior in a short period of time. If you do not see an obvious improvement, they probably should not be taking the stuff. It is that simple.
-- Temple Grandin -
If you have autism in the family history, you still vaccinate. Delay it a bit, space them out.
-- Temple Grandin -
I'm a visual thinker, not a language-based thinker. My brain is like Google Images.
-- Temple Grandin -
Who do you think made the first stone spears? The Asperger guy. If you were to get rid of all the autism genetics, there would be no more Silicon Valley.
-- Temple Grandin -
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I am also a believer in an integrated treatment approach to autism.
-- Temple Grandin -
I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff.
-- Temple Grandin -
Autism is part of who I am.
-- Temple Grandin -
There needs to be a lot more emphasis on what a child CAN do, instead of what he cannot do.
-- Temple Grandin -
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Animals make us Human.
-- Temple Grandin -
Lets get into talking about how autism is similar animal behavior. The thing is I dont think in a language, and animals dont think in a language. Its sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. Its putting these sensory based memories into categories.
-- Temple Grandin -
we raise them for us; that means we owe them some respect. nature is creul but we dont have to be. i wouldnt want to have my guts ripped out by a lion. i'd much rather die in a slaughter house if it were done right.
-- Temple Grandin -
I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.
-- Temple Grandin -
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The big companies are like steel and activists are like heat. Activists soften the steel, and then I can bend it into pretty grillwork and make reforms.
-- Temple Grandin -
I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result.
-- Temple Grandin -
But my favorite of Einstein's words on religion is "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." I like this because both science and religion are needed to answer life's great questions.
-- Temple Grandin -
Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.
-- Temple Grandin -
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If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.
-- Temple Grandin -
What I've tried to do is combine both my personal experiences with scientific research. I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.
-- Temple Grandin
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