These stigma quotes will inspire you. Stigma is when someone views you in a negative way because you have a distinguishing characteristic or personal trait that’s thought to be, or actually is, a disadvantage (a negative stereotype) or a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging stigma quotes, stigma sayings, and stigma proverbs.
Best Stigma Quotes
- “Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of “crackpot” than the stigma of conformity.” ~ Thomas J. Watson
- “Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.” ~ Erving Goffman
- “Step by step, we will break this cycle of silence, poor information, and stigma.” ~ Chevy Chase
- “Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.” ~ William J. Clinton , Stigma quotes mental illness
-
“By telling my own story, I hope to help remove the stigma. It never should be something to hide.” ~ Richard Dreyfuss
- “For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism – either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world, and does even worse things. The last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.” ~ John Steinbeck
- “Stigma hurts. Because of AIDS, children are bullied, isolated, and shut out of school. They are missing out on education. They are missing out on medicines. Children are missing your love, care, and protection. Join me. And become a stigma buster. UNITE FOR CHILDREN UNITE AGAINST AIDS” ~ Jackie Chan
- “The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.” ~ Juliette Lewis
- “I want to change the cycle of stigma and prejudice that destroys lives all over the world every day. Until we can get in front of people and awaken them to the idea that this is not acceptable.” ~ Timothy Shriver
-
“There is no stigma attached to recognizing a bad decision in time to install a better one.” ~ Laurence J. Peter
- “Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.” ~ Germaine Greer
- “The problem with the stigma around mental health is really about the stories that we tell ourselves as a society. What is normal? That’s just a story that we tell ourselves.” ~ Matthew Quick
- “Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature.” ~ Germaine Greer
- “And we have come so far like that. I mean, the advances on the medication side have been enormous, and the advances on the human side have been enormous. But we still have this stigma to get rid of, and then we really will be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.” ~ Elton John
-
“Any stigma, as the old saying is, will serve to beat a dogma.” ~ Philip Guedalla
- “Where LGBT and mental health issues collide is over stigma. And stigma is society’s problem not the problem of the LGBT or mental health community. What we have to deal with is the ignorance, fear, and prejudice that blight the lives of those who have nothing wrong with them in any moral or transgressive sense. It is society that is ill.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “We’re all in this together. It’s okay to be honest. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to say you’re stuck, or that you’re haunted or that you can’t begin to let go. We can all relate to those things. Screw the stigma that says otherwise. Break the silence and break the cycle, for you are more than just your pain. You are not alone. And people need other people.” ~ Jamie Tworkowski
- “Given the reality of unintended parenthood and parental unhappiness, one would think that women and men who make the decision not to have children – who are deliberate and thoughtful about the choice to bring another person into the world – would be seen as less selfish than those who unthinkingly have children. Yet the stigma remains.” ~ Jessica Valenti
-
“The only reason I’ve shared my story is to take that tiny baby step of breaking down the stigma attached to depression.” ~ Clara Hughes
- “I still cannot fathom how difficult it was for the women I met to find out that they were HIV-positive. It is such a courageous undertaking in countries where there is still considerable stigma about the disease. They got tested to ensure that their unborn babies would have a chance of life by being born free of the virus.” ~ Gabriel Byrne , HIV stigma quotes
- “I think it’s important to encourage young people to tell their own stories and to speak openly about their own experiences with the criminal justice system and the experiences of their family. We need to ensure that the classroom environment is a supportive one so that the shame and stigma can be dispelled.” ~ Michelle Alexander
- “Children who have lost parents to HIV/AIDS are not only just as deserving of an education as any other children, but they may need that education even more. Being part of a school environment will prepare them for the future while helping to remove the stigma and discrimination unfortunately associated with AIDS.” ~ Harry Belafonte
- “The notion that “applied” knowledge is somehow less worthy than “pure” knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them.” ~ John Dewey
-
“I want to break down some of the stigma associated with mental illness.” ~ Gail Porter
- “Here’s the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it’s put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don’t call them a white film. I’m trying to remove the stigma of things they call black films.” ~ Kevin Hart
- “I spent the past week here in India getting a sense of the reality of HIV and AIDS in people’s lives. Fathers and mothers are dying, leaving children with no support. Stigma and discrimination is ruining the family lives. There is an urgent need for education, information, and increased awareness of HIV and AIDS. The response needs to be now. We cannot afford to become fatigued.” ~ Ralph Fiennes
- “The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband’s house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest-paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked.” ~ Germaine Greer
- “Joe Louis and I were the first modern national sports figures who were black… But neither of us could do national advertising because the South wouldn’t buy it. That was the social stigma we lived under.” ~ Jesse Owens
-
“I don’t want to be known as a sex symbol. There’s a great stigma that goes with that tag. I want to be a Sam Elliott.” ~ Sam Elliott
- “We give each other a wide berth even if we have the flu, let alone… So, I think that’s part of the stigma that people who have diseases suffer. It’s almost infectious… if somebody is closer to death, they’re almost a bad omen and I think that’s terrible.” ~ Peter Morgan
- “The mental cognitive processes that we’re targeting are ones that narrow human beings’ repertoire and make it harder for them to learn to be more flexible, to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them. We can have something to help within areas like child development or organizations and schools, or maybe even how peoples interact with each other, one to the other. We’ve taken the work into things like prejudice and stigma, because if we can’t solve that we have planes flying into buildings. So it applies broadly because anywhere that a human mind goes these processes go.” ~ Steven C. Hayes
- “Since I come from a family of mental instability, and I have suffered depression myself, I knew that living in shame is senseless and painful and that by talking about it, I have come to peace with it. The stigma behind people’s suffering needs to end. We as a community need to embrace these disorders, try to understand them (if only just to talk about them) so that we can cease being defined by them.” ~ Mariel Hemingway , Depression stigma quotes
- “No stigma attaches to the love of money in America, and provided it does not exceed the bounds imposed by public order, it is held in honor. The American will describe as noble and estimable ambition that our medieval ancestors would have called base cupidity.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
-
“Women should feel happy with their bodies and not live with the stigma that comes from not looking like models in fashion magazines.” ~ Shakira
- “We can prevent more people from becoming more addicted – that’s number one – with prescribing laws and making sure that people can’t get too many of these opioids when they are initially prescribed them. Number two is, we have to make sure the millions of people who are already addicted have access to good and effective treatment. Finally, it’s critical that we remove stigma and that’s why we’ve made a film, to show that this can happen to anyone.” ~ Perri Peltz
- “I think a trillion dollars of student loans and a massive skills gap are precisely what happens to a society that actively promotes one form of education as the best course for the most people. I think the stigmas and stereotypes that keep so many people from pursuing a truly useful skill, begin with the mistaken belief that a four-year degree is somehow superior to all other forms of learning.” ~ Mike Rowe
- “And the stigma hasn’t really changed that much in 31 years. You are still getting people – it’s a shame-based disease. It’s based on sexual transmission. And it’s still shame-based. And until people feel strong enough and feel loved enough to actually open up and say, listen, I’m HIV-positive, then we are facing an uphill battle.” ~ Elton John
-
“I don’t have any stigma attached to my body. When I’m in my own private space, I have very little on.” ~ Padma Lakshmi
- “If you go off into general-interest magazines, often women are being shoved aside into various ghettos that perpetuate the problem. Women’s interests are specialized, they’re secondary; they’re somewhere over to the side of the serious work that’s being done. Throughout history, there have been ladies’ magazines, ladies’ journals, and for years there have been women writers who would refuse to participate in women-only sort projects because of that stigma.” ~ Erin Belieu
- “We did something that bands are kind of afraid of, or at least used to be, [which] is the YouTube scene. They don’t want the YouTube stigma.” ~ Chrissy Costanza
- “Being a figurehead for those with family members in prison is somewhat new for me. Something I’ve discovered since my father’s incarceration is that the prison system is broken. My first-hand experiences have taught me that reform needs to happen sooner than later. I’m most interested in mentoring children with parents in prison. When a parent is sentenced to a jail term, the child is sentenced to the same time to be spent without a mother or father. No child should suffer a stigma or lack support and guidance because of the sins of a parent.” ~ Kambri Crews
- “Say you’re a sex worker and your partner knows you’re a sex worker, but you’re not out to your family. That could be very dangerous, particularly in an unhealthy relationship, where it could be a recipe for conflict, for something potentially violent that could lead to someone going to jail. There’s so much pressure because of the criminalization and stigma. If we lifted that, it’s only going to benefit more women.” ~ Melissa Gira Grant
-
“Generally, the greater the stigma or revulsion, the better the bargain.” ~ Seth Klarman
- “A man has always been seen as someone who works hard and has a full-time occupation. I think women should have the same opportunity and not have any stigma attached to them if they choose to pursue their careers.” ~ Meryl Streep
- “There is a lot of stigma and snobbiness about the self-help genre, and I can’t vouch for everything out there, but for me, the idea of giving someone else the gift of inspiration and making them feel passionate and capable in an area of their life is the most incredible thing in the world.” ~ Matthew Hussey
- “When I was growing up, everybody smoked, including me. When I was 14, I started. We all did it. That was just the way it was. And nowadays there’s a stigma attached to it. It’s a big shift.” ~ Wayne Dyer
- “Think about the stigma that is attached to the idea that alcoholism is a disease, an incurable illness, and you have it. That’s a terrible thing to inflict on someone. Labeling alcoholism as a disease, a cause unto itself, simply no longer fits with what we know today about its causes.” ~ Chris Prentiss
-
“I want people to get over the stigma about hemp. These seeds can’t make you high, but they will make you feel good.” ~ Ziggy Marley
- “Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.” ~ David Chalmers
- “There’s that stigma about New Yorkers, how they’re so mean, but in my experience it was quite the opposite. People were very genuine and very nice, even on the subway.” ~ Taylor Kitsch
- “We can’t exactly figure out why, but our customers have no fears of using their checking account, while credit cards are still a problem. I’m assuming checks have been around longer, and are more trusted, while credit cards have a sort of stigma attached to them.” ~ Tim Stevens
- “We think that if we get tested, that means you have to have HIV. Or we think that just by knowing someone with HIV, we’re going to get HIV or because he’s gay or she’s a lesbian or whatever. This false information has been put out there and it’s created this stigma that stops us from going to find out if we’re infected. The truth is it doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re having sex, you need to be getting tested, plain and simple.” ~ Jay Ellis
-
“To be gay and out of shape is almost as much of a stigma as just being gay used to be.” ~ Bruce Vilanch
- “For me, there is a stigma attached to playing beautiful parts. They are often empty characters whom the action happens around. I’m more drawn to characters with a complex internal life, who have a burning frustration underneath that keeps them going.” ~ Ruth Wilson
- “While there may have once been a stigma to making money, high-earning women actually have an advantage in the dating-and-marriage market.” ~ Liza Mundy
- “I went public with the alcoholism, very early on… the early ’70s. Mercedes McCambridge, the actress, I think was the first recognizable person that went before Congress and talked about it, and I thought that was a good idea, to take some of the stigma away from it and say “Normal, average people can fall prey to it.” So it’s been public for me. I did a movie about an alcoholic. And today, you’re nobody unless you’ve been to rehab. It seems like everybody has some kind of an addiction.” ~ Dick Van Dyke
- “I’m more critical of my songwriting than anybody, but I’ve worked really hard in the last five to 10 years to improve. I didn’t take it all that seriously when I started. It was a little bit of a stigma to being a songwriter or a folkie back then. I did a lot of send-ups of sensitive singer-songwriter stuff when I was starting out, which limited my development as a songwriter in a way. I wasn’t really fully given license to explore that until the mid-90s. I’m still working on it; I’m a little bit of a late bloomer.” ~ Beck
-
“The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.” ~ Amy Lowell
- “When I was younger, there was a sort of stigma attached to my stamina. My dad took me swimming one day and I just was no good at it, so my dad said, ‘Your stamina’s bad.” ~ Charlie Bewley
- “I think the scariest addiction on this planet is to alcohol. Because alcohol is a very addictive drug, and it ruins families, it ruins relationships. And it is socially acceptable, and it is easy to find. Controlled substances, other drugs are more difficult to get, and it’s a crime to… to buy them. But alcohol is everywhere. And if you are unfortunate enough to become addicted to it, it can be disastrous. And there is still a stigma attached to alcohol addiction or addiction in general. It is perceived as… an addict is perceived as somebody of weak moral fiber” ~ Brian Molko
- “A lot of authors see their book being banned or challenged as a badge of honor. But for me, it’s nothing but frustrating and upsetting. I hear from readers that my work encouraged them to ask for help or reach out to someone about the situation they’re in. When you hear stories like that on a daily basis and then hear adults call for your work to be banned, it’s proof of why the stigma around these issues is so dangerous.” ~ Jay Asher
-
“You have, you can only answer it this way: by turning it around. Can the negro – who is the victim of the system – escape the collective stigma that is placed upon all Negroes in this country?” ~ Malcolm X
- “There’s so much stigma around HIV/AIDS. It’s a challenging issue and the people that already have been tested and know their status find it very, very hard to disclose their status, to live with that virus, and to even seek out the kind of information they need. This experience of going to South Africa a decade ago really woke me up to the scale of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, how it was affecting women and their children. I haven’t been able to walk away from it.” ~ Annie Lennox
- “Regardless of what other stigmas may be involved, I think we have to do this because the world of medicine is trying to do the exact same thing and figure it out and they’re coming to some conclusions.” ~ Pete Carroll
