Top 116 Autistic Quotes & Sayings

You have got to keep autistic children engaged with the world. You cannot let them tune out.

My biggest challenge is my severely autistic son.

Vaccination programs were instituted in the late 1930s, and the first handful of autistic babies were noted in the early 1940s. When vaccination programs were expanded after the war, the number of autistic children increased greatly.

I know a number of autistic adults that are doing extremely well on Prozac.

We're all a little nit autistic.

Research demonstrates that autistic traits are distributed into the non-autistic population; some people have more of them, some have fewer. History suggests that many individuals whom we would today diagnose as autistic - some severely so - contributed profoundly to our art, our math, our science, and our literature.

With the right support and reasonable adjustments, autistic people make wonderful employees.

In America we've spent over a billion dollars on autism research. What have we got for that? We've not seen anything that's appreciably impacted the quality of life of autistic people, regardless of their place on the spectrum. Quite frankly, we've spent $1bn figuring out how to make mice autistic and we'll spend another $1bn figuring out how to make them not autistic. And that's not what the average person wakes up in the morning aspiring to. They think: am I going to be able to find a job, to communicate, to live independently, either on my own or with support? Those are the real priorities.

I feel very strongly that if you got rid of all of the autistic genetics you're not going to have any scientists. There'd be no computer people. You'd lose a lot of artists and musicians. There'd be a horrible price to pay.

Most people assume that autistic people are not capable of empathy.

Autistic people's disabilities are widely known, but one of their best-established strengths is their attention to detail.

I think that autistic brains tend to be specialized brains. Autistic people tend to be less social. It takes a ton of processor space in the brain to have all the social circuits.

As you may know, some of the stereotyped behaviors exhibited by autistic children are also found in zoo animals who are raised in a barren environment.

I don't often know where my ideas come from. Maybe it's the fact that I'm obsessively regimented in my analysis, borderline autistic. But whether it's bond selection or asset allocation, we can do it better than just about anybody around.

I'm glad Carol Vorderman has left Countdown, I mean it's not like she did much. She was effectively just an autistic shelf-stacker.

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.

We all want our children to be the best they can be; and one of the blessings of having an autistic child is that you notice every little achievement, and it becomes cause for celebration.

The autistic brain tends to be a specialist brain, good at one thing, bad at something else.

It's absolutely imperative for the parents and the typical kids to have time by themselves, to go out to dinner or even go on vacation while someone else cares for the autistic child.

Some autistic people have savant skills. All autistic people do not have savant skills. Autism is a very variable disorder varying all the way from Einstein, emollient scientist, just a little bit of the trait, many scientist and engineers, down to somebody that's going to remain nonverbal.

I used to work with autistic children, and they said a lot of funny things to me.

It took 24 years for me to harness my autistic traits into something useful, and I have grown to regard them as a kind of superpower. Cooking, to me, is akin to algebra, and my mind a pocket calculator.

For a seriously autistic kid, the best prognosis might be getting into a mainstream school without being too much of a shadow. For a moderately autistic kid the best prognosis is full recovery.

I know of nobody who is purely autistic, or purely neurotypical. Even God has some autistic moments, which is why the planets spin.

My brother is severely autistic, so when I was a kid I spent a lot of time as a teenager in camps and programs for autistic kids. When I went to McGill as an undergraduate, I figured I'd be a therapist working with these kids. The truth is, and I knew this even back then, I'm just not good at this. I'm too empathic to do this sort of thing.

Animals are like autistic savants. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that animals might actually be autistic savants. Animals have special talents normal people don't, the same way autistic people have special talents normal people don't; and at least some animals have special forms of genius normal people don't, the same way some autistic savants have special forms of genius. I think most of the time animal genius probably happens for the same reason autistic genius does: a difference in the brain autistic people share with animals.

My little brother is autistic, so I would love to be involved in a charity for autism, but I haven't found the right one yet.

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.

Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don't have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can't stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there's too much stimulation.

If you have a 2 or 3 year old who is not talking, you must start an early intervention program. The worst thing you can do with an autistic 3 year old is to do nothing.

Much attention has been focused on the MMR shot itself, whereas in all probability it is a combination of the three factors listed above: the increasing number of vaccines, the large amount of mercury, and the inherent danger of the triple vaccine.....The MMR vaccine is also especially suspect because laboratories in England, Ireland, and Japan have found evidence of MMR vaccine viruses in the intestinal tracts of autistic children, but not in control group, non-autistic children.

I was talented but crazy, semi-autistic and eccentric.

Social interactions can be enormously challenging for people on the spectrum. That's part of the reason that unemployment among autistic adults hovers near 80 percent.

One in 150 kids is autistic these days. The autism spectrum is growing.

The autistic personality is an extreme variant of male intelligence.

I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they just carry on like before.

Nobel prize-calibre geniuses often have certain core autistic features at their heart.

We can change the lives of autistic children. We can make a difference. There are hundreds of families in Florida who can't afford the therapists.

Our difficulty is that we have become autistic. We no longer listen to what the Earth, its landscape, its atmospheric phenomena and all its living forms, its mountains and valleys, the rain, the wind, and all the flora and fauna of the planet are telling us.

There does seem to be a higher educational level in parents of autistic youngsters, and I guess that's something that we need to look into.

In fact, there are autism clusters, you know, around some of the big tech centers. You take two socially awkward computer programmers and put them together, that can kind of concentrate the autistic genes.

Mark Zuckerberg is a genius. Not in the Asperger's, autistic way depicted in the very fictional movie 'The Social' Network, the cognitive genius of exceptional ability. That's a modern definition that reduces the original meaning.

I don't know of any neuropsychiatric disorder other than an infection that has been cured. But the goal is to improve the quality of life of people who experience autistic symptomology and I just think we will make progress on that.

Autistic children are very difficult to take care of, especially severely autistic ones. When I was 4, I had almost no language; when I was 3, I had none at all.

It's much more work for the mother of an autistic child to have a job, because working with an autistic child is such a hassle until they go to school.

Many autistic people have this ability to learn weird foreign languages, and I think I've heard of autistic Americans who have been obsessed [with] Icelandic and learned it and speak it fluently, and I've seen it done in interviews on television.

People on the autistic spectrum tend to get fixated on what they think.

Some teachers just have a knack for working with autistic children. Other teachers do not have it.

And I'm autistic, which means I can be hyperfocused but also all over the place at the same time. I think I'm very lucky to have found cooking because it's the one area where a brain like mine really thrives.

I think that autistic brains tend to be specialized brains. Autistic people tend to be less social. It takes a ton of processor space in the brain to have all the social circuits. I mean after all, the first stone spear was not designed by the totally social people.

Autistic peoples' excellent attention to detail means they may make fewer mistakes, and their narrow focus may mean that they are not satisfied until a task is completed.

You go into another time zone when you are a parent of an autistic child, where any micro movement in a positive direction is such a cause for celebration.

Some autistic people may emerge from their condition, but nobody knows when and why.

Compared to the challenges or raising an autistic child, weightlifting is a relief.

A woman told me her child was autistic, and I thought she said artistic. So I said, 'Oh great. I'd like to see some of the things he's done.

I don't define myself as autistic first. I don't want to be a professional autistic. I think it's important to have a real job.

There are three basic ways [to use a dog to work with autistic children], one is just to be companion person and I'm thinking now more of autistic kids not somebody in a wheelchair or the dog belongs to a therapist and then it's used as an ice breaker to get the kid talking and get the kid interacting.

Autistic children are extremely bright if you can connect to them and bring them into our world. Socially it's really hard for them, but it can happen.

Mom worked with autistic children.

I'm glad Carol Vorderman has left 'Countdown;' I mean, it's not like she did much. She was effectively just an autistic shelf-stacker.