A Quote by Fran Lebowitz

The effect of AIDS was like a war in a minute country. Like, in World War I, a whole generation of Englishmen died all at once. And with AIDS, a whole generation of gay men died practically all at once, within a couple of years.
All of my peers died of AIDS, and I have no one to celebrate my past or my journey, or to help me pass down stories to the next generation. We lost an entire generation of storytellers with HIV.
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.
HIV/AIDS is the greatest danger we have faced for many, many centuries. HIV/AIDS is worse than a war. It is like a world war. Millions of people are dying from it.
Let us give publicity to H.I.V./AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died because of H.I.V./AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary.
Ludicrous concepts…like the whole idea of a 'war on terrorism'. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?
Once I started to retire, I was telling all of the girls in my generation, 'Wow I feel like an outsider in this locker room because this whole new generation of women has stepped in,' and that was one of the signs where I said maybe it's time to retire.
It was like someone had died- like I had died. Because it had been more than just losing the truest of true loves, as if that were not enough to kill anyone. It was also losing a whole future, a whole family- the whole life that I'd chosen...
My grandfather for example only died twice, once during the war and once in the 1980s.
The unraveling that I experienced much earlier in the Vietnam war than many people think, was due to the immediate foxhole experiences. But once I got back home and began to follow the war on TV and in the press I began to see this enormous con game - I can't think of any other word for it - that government and the military was foisting on the American people, especially on the young men of my generation, and even worse, the young men of my generation who weren't particularly economically or intellectually privileged.
Well, from 1969 to 1984, until he died of AIDS, a teacher and I were very good friends. He even attended celebrations at my home, and I have to admit I even went with him to gay bars once in a while. So I know a homophobe when I see one. Pat Buchanan ain't no homophobe, believe me.
As of 2013, according to the World Health Organization, 35 million people were estimated to be living with HIV or AIDS globally, and 39 million have died from the disease. The epidemic of denial won, and now everyone knows there is money in the making of drugs for AIDS.
The best way to deal with AIDS is through education. So we need a really widespread AIDS education program. In fact, what we need in Burma is education of all kinds - political, economic, and medical. AIDS education would be just part of a whole program for education, which is so badly needed in our country.
My parents, they grew up in a time when there was war in Korea. And my grandmother, her husband, my grandfather, was a soldier and he died in the war. A lot of people in that generation, they didn't go to schools. My grandmother couldn't read; she didn't finish beyond elementary school.
When my father died of AIDS, I knew I had to do everything in my power to prevent others from going through what he endured. I support AmFAR which provides funds for cutting edge AIDS research so we can find a vaccine and a cure.
As Churchill said about the Great War, and he said this in about 1924, that it was the first war in which man realized that he could obliterate himself completely. If you consider the way the whole world was impacted, 18 million people worldwide died, and that is taking into account military and civilian deaths: 18 million people. And it was the whole world, if you will. You know, many of those trenches were dug by Chinese. There are photographs of Chinese looking like they just came from China, with their hats and so on, digging the trenches, right from the beginning.
I am proud of the advances we have made in New York where we have continued a legacy of substantive HIV/AIDS policy, but we must continue the fight to end the epidemic and ensure an AIDS-free generation.
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