These polio quotes will inspire you. Polio, or poliomyelitis, is a disabling and life-threatening disease caused by the poliovirus.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging polio quotes, polio sayings, and polio proverbs.
Best Polio Quotes
- “When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.” ~ Francis Ford Coppola
- “Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio.” ~ Melinda Gates
- “We have completely eradicated smallpox; we have almost eradicated polio. That’s the miracle of vaccines, which is even greater than that of antibiotics.” ~ Bill Gates
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“We’re all responsible for creating a polio-free world while we still can.” ~ Bill Gates
- “I had a series of childhood illnesses… scarlet fever…. pneumonia…. Polio. I walked with braces until I was at least nine years old. My life wasn’t like the average person who grew up and decided to enter the world of sports.” ~ Wilma Rudolph
- “If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you’re out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung.” ~ Billie Holiday
- “If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism.” ~ Jenny McCarthy , Polio quotes vaccine
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“When you inoculate children with a polio vaccine, you don’t sleep well for two or three months.” ~ Jonas Salk
- “I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school, they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button.” ~ Francis Ford Coppola
- “[Who owns the patent on this vaccine?] Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” ~ Jonas Salk
- “Provocation polio. That is the truth about those outbreaks of polio. And I offer a well considered personal opinion that polio is a man made disease.” ~ Viera Scheibner
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“Fear is the polio of the soul. Faith is the life based on unseen realities; it is the word become flesh.” ~ Clarence Jordan
- “I think disease and all the things that we treat are tied to national security in a lot of ways that we maybe don’t realize or that the American people don’t realize. If other countries have a chance to be stable, then that helps us. If there are ways we can prevent if there are ways we can help other countries defeat diseases, we’re about to totally eradicate polio. And can you imagine? That would be so terrific.” ~ Laura Bush
- “India just went 3 years with no cases [of polio]. Pakistan is our toughest location right now because some parts of the Taliban have not allowed vaccinators to come in and have even attacked vaccinators. We are hopeful this will get resolved since no one wants their kid to be paralyzed. I spend a lot of time making sure the polio campaign is doing the best it can. We have great computer models that help guide our activities.” ~ Bill Gates
- “A deranged person is supposed to have the strength of ten men. I have the strength of one small boy… with polio.” ~ Woody Allen
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“In Jamaica, we eradicated polio many years ago, but there are a lot of kids suffering in Africa still.” ~ Ziggy Marley
- “Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child’s death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections.” ~ Ezekiel Emanuel
- “Somebody bought me a Snuggie as a joke gift. Haha, the joke’s on you, I enjoy it. I toss and turn at night, finally a blanket that’s like, ‘I’m going to keep you warm.’ It’s like having a small child with polio keep you in a full nelson – the perfect pressure.” ~ Daniel Tosh
- “Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.” ~ Bill Gates
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“I’ve crippled more people than polio.” ~ The Undertaker
- “Polio has not been eradicated by vaccination, it is lurking behind a redefinition and new diagnostic names like viral or aseptic meningitis…….According to one of the 1997 issues of the MMWR, there are some 30,000 to 50,000 cases of viral meningitis per year in the United States alone. That’s where all those 30,000 – 50,000 cases of polio disappeared after the introduction of mass vaccination” ~ Viera Scheibner
- “I am no saviour. I’m absolutely the last person on the planet who can practically help. I don’t know how to make the different types of therapeutic feeding milk. I’m no chemist. I’m no doctor. I’m no engineer. I can’t manufacture polio vaccines or organise their transportation to the health centres in Saramoussayah or Bissikirima. I can’t build schools, or design drainage systems. I can’t provide the women and children of Mandiana with water.All I can do now is help make people aware of what is happening, of what they are doing. That is all that I can do. For now.” ~ Tom Hiddleston
- “My mother is a fighter. After she battled polio and learned to walk again, the doctors told her she would be a cripple her entire life. Instead of accepting defeat, she refused this fate and went on to become the West African Womens Singles tennis champion in college.” ~ Uzo Aduba
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“Nature is that lovely lady to whom we owe polio, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, cancer.” ~ Stanley Norman Cohen
- “It’s extremely hard to get rid of any population. When they say polio is essentially wiped out, it’s not. If we let up on the vaccinations, it will make a come back.” ~ Greg Graffin
- “That is why we have the polio vaccine. People are blazing their own trial. That is what seems to be important. I don’t care to follow and to do what the mass is doing. That is not doing anything, to be doing what everyone else is doing. Everybody is unique. The funny thing about people now is that people don’t really understand or really appreciate how unique each individual on earth is.” ~ Henry Threadgill
- “Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, small pox and malaria.” ~ Victor Davis Hanson
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“If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate….Try science.” ~ Carl Sagan
- “The work on [polio] prevention was long delayed by… misleading experimental models of the disease in monkeys” ~ Albert Sabin
- “Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.” ~ Sarah Vowell
- “My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was – my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the ’30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me.” ~ Helen Gurley Brown
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“Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.” ~ Jonas Salk
- “Humans have always used our intelligence and creativity to improve our existence. After all, we invented the wheel, discovered how to make fire, invented the printing press and found a vaccine for polio.” ~ Naveen Jain
- “Sport can be used for messaging, for example, making the connections between shin guards or a helmet that protects you, and protection in terms of HIV and AIDS. There has also been a very active program in Africa called ‘Kick Polio out of Africa,’ where soccer players have spoken out in terms of polio. There is also going to be a swim for malaria.” ~ Carol Bellamy
- “When I was a child, there were not that many vaccines. I was vaccinated for polio. I actually got measles as a child. I got pertussis, whooping cough. I remember that very well.” ~ Anthony S. Fauci
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“My father contracted polio on a troop train in Korea.” ~ David Alan Grier
- “I had polio when I was 13. I started feeling stiff, my joints ached, and over a two-week period I lost my coordination and 20 pounds.” ~ Jack Nicklaus
- “We have yet to beat our drums for birth control in the way we beat them for polio vaccine. We are still unable to put babies in the class of dangerous epidemics, even though this is the exact truth.” ~ Mary Calderone
- “In most of these things our foundation is a co-funder, so I can say that a polio or an HIV vaccine, that I’m putting our resources behind it in a very big way and the U.S. government would be the best partner for those efforts.” ~ Bill Gates
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“We’ve actually eliminated Type II polio in the world, at least as far as we can tell.” ~ Seth Berkley
- “Some survived due to advancements in engineering. Personally I’d take a vaccine over living in an iron lung. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/what-america-looked-like-polio-children-paralyzed-in-iron-lungs/251098/” ~ Howard Tayler
- “The main problem, certainly, for the people who will not get vaccinated with Thimerosal, which was put into polio vaccine. And the belief was that it may cause autism. And there’s been an awful lot done in terms of studies in Western Europe, Canada, the United States, and no correlation was found between Thimerosal and autism from those children who took vaccines. Indeed, when Thimerosal was taken out of many of these vaccines, the autism rate in the United States still rose.” ~ David Oshinsky
- “I was a shy ugly kid who led a big fantasy life. I thought I was an angel sent from heaven, to cure polio. When Dr. Salk did that I was really pissed off.” ~ Cher
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“Fear is the polio of the soul which prevents our walking by faith.” ~ Clarence Jordan
- “We are ever on the threshold of new journeys and new discoveries. Can you imagine the excitement of the Wright brothers on the morning of that first flight? The anticipation of Jonas Salk as he analyzed the data that demonstrated a way to prevent polio?” ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin
- “If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you’ll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases.” ~ Bill Gates
- “There are cases where government-to-government aid actually has worked. Look at the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. But these are really top down solutions that require government-to-government support and aid.” ~ Jacqueline Novogratz
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“Fortunately, perhaps, I was completely ignorant of the orthodox theory of the disease polio-myelitis.” ~ Elizabeth Kenny
- “I have studied the effects of our new lots of polio vaccine in 100 adult volunteers and during the next few days shall give it to my wife and 2 children as well as to our neighbors and their children.” ~ Albert Sabin
- “It blows my mind that there are people out there who deny the holocaust. Why would you ever deny such a great achievement. It’s like denying the cure for polio or something.” ~ Zach Braff
- “My two Jamaican cousins … were studying engineering. ‘That’s where the money is,’ Mom advised. … I was to be an engineering major, despite my allergy to science and math. … Those who preceded me at CCNY include the polio vaccine discoverer, Dr. Jonas Salk … and eight Nobel Prize winners. … In class, I stumbled through math, fumbled through physics, and did reasonably well in, and even enjoyed, geology. All I ever looked forward to was ROTC.
Autobiographical comments on his original reason for going to the City College of New York, where he shortly turned to his military career.” ~ Colin Powell - “Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn’t live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.” ~ David Sedaris
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“Without animal research, polio would still be claiming thousands of lives each year.” ~ Albert Sabin
- “But cancer can also be fun with its luncheons, theatre parties, and fund raising luaus. …What will they all do if a cure comes out of it? Considering how easily the March of Dimes conglomerate shifted gears after the polio vaccine, it should pose no problem.” ~ Edgar Berman
- “Scientists can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance. You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anaemia, or you can take Vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you’re interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want . . . but they’ll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy . . . try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science.” ~ Carl Sagan
- “In my life I have had various health threats: polio, seizures, a brain aneurysm. None of these things has really changed me much, although it is hard to say for sure. These are events that are part of my life. They make me who I am. I am thankful for them. They are scary.” ~ Neil Young
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“Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.” ~ Bill Gates
- “Even to this day, the government, the FDA is refusing to use the sophisticated biotechnology to evaluate the contaminants in the vaccines such as the polio vaccines that they are administering. I think (people) would be appalled that some of the vaccines that are currently being used are still laced with viruses.” ~ Leonard Horowitz
- “I do not argue that nature is sacrosanct in the sense that we must never tamper with nature. That would disempower, really, all of medicine. That would mean that we can’t combat dread diseases – malaria, polio, all of which are given by nature, if one thinks about it.” ~ Michael Sandel
- “I’ve seen people talk about how they stopped polio, that was a generation that came together and said, “Let’s do this.” I think in the AIDS community we’ve become so complacent in that, it’s like we just plateaued… We’ve completely neglected a whole young generation that is now highly infected.” ~ Charlize Theron
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“I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.” ~ Bill Gates
- “As a health scientist at Columbia University, Les Roberts, pointed out, sooner or later people are going to be looking at a child in a wheelchair suffering from polio and will say ‘the Americans did that to him’. So they continue policies which have similar effects i.e. organising the Taliban. This will come back to them too.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “With polio, we’ve gone several years with no polio in all of Africa, but now with this we’re having to go and mop up in that whole region, so it’s a bit of a setback for polio. So in parallel we have to go back and get rid of those cases.” ~ Bill Gates
- “We have two other countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan – again it’s the instability that is a problem there. So over the next several years, we expect to drive the number of [polio] cases back down to zero because that is likely to be the second disease after smallpox that we completely eradicate.” ~ Bill Gates
- “If somebody is working on a new medicine, computer science helps us model those things. We have a whole group here in Seattle called the Institute for Disease Modelling that is a mix of computer science and math-type people, and the progress we’re making in polio or plans for malaria or really driven by their deep insights.” ~ Bill Gates
