219 Quotes by Temple Grandin

Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be.

If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave.

We should assume that some captive animals feel frustrated being locked up inside. Many captive animals try to escape as soon as they have an opportunity.

Animals don't have purely behavioral needs, and if an animal expresses a normal behavior in an abnormal environment, its welfare may be poor.

Lot of animals living in captivity don't mate successfully because there's something wrong with their living conditions that stops them from acting naturally.

Livestock producers observe that when rough, stressful handling practices are eliminated, cattle resume eating a full day earlier.

I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.

Curiosity is the other side of caution.

It's OK to be an eccentric; it's not OK to be a rude and dirty eccentric.

The worst thing you can do is nothing. (re: teaching children with autism).

I'm pure geek, pure logic.

People can live up to high standards, but they can't live up to perfection.

My mind works like Google for images. You put in a key word; it brings up pictures. See language for me narrates the pictures in my mind.

We found if you took the dog out for 45 minutes a day and worked with it that the solitary stress hormone, cortisol, went down. But then it went right back up again because they didn't keep doing it.

A cat can be social, but a dog, we've bred this hyper social animal that's really truly different and will do stuff for us just to please us with praise and stroking.

Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, Oh, he has autism. That's the problem--and then he didn't treat the GI problem.

Medication should never be considered the only tool for helping a person.

I'm seeing too many geeky, nerdy kids get addicted to video games and they're going nowhere. It's making me crazy.

There's a point where anecdotal evidence becomes truth.

My mind sort of works like a search engine. You ask me something, and I start seeing pictures.

I want get people to think about sensory based of thinking.

What do I do when I go home? Work. That's basically my social life. I'm married to work.

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.

You can't punish a child who is acting out because of sensory overload.

I've been on antidepressants for years, and it worked to stop my anxiety and didn't limit creativity. Some of the best work I've done, in fact, is after I started taking the antidepressants.

You got barn cats and you want to make them tamed, you need to get them as kittens.

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.

Here's certain things that are similar to cats and dogs. Dogs are just hyper social and they have a want to please you way more than a cat does.

I'd rather have a kid come up to me and tell me that he loves dinosaurs or he loves airplanes or he likes training dogs or I like Shakespeare. I mean, just something.

Us visual thinkers like me, be good at things like industrial design, graphics, art, those kind of jobs.

You could train cats do things, a lot of people don't think cats aren't trainable. Cats can be trusted just a friend.

If you get a little kitty and he's down on the bottom, and he's laying on his chest, you know tucked up underneath, then that cat is not relaxed.

Things like microphones are dangerous things because you never know when they might feedback and squeal.

The animal that I have worked with the most is beef cattle, so that's my favorite animal, but I like all animals.

I think sometimes parents and teachers fail to stretch kids. My mother had a very good sense of how to stretch me just slightly outside my comfort zone.

I can remember being bullied and teased. It was absolutely horrible. I got kicked out of ninth grade for throwing a book at a girl who teased me. It was absolutely terrible.

I'm a believer in biochemistry. But I tell people to try only one thing at a time to see if it works. And if you do give a powerful drug to a kid, it better have a big wow factor.

I've got my one area I work in and I want to educate people about autism and I also want to improve, you know, animal handling and transport and make a real change out in the field on the ground.

I'm seeing too many smart kind of socially awkward kids, a lot milder than I was, not getting employment because they're not learning job skills.

I'm seeing too many kind of socially awkward kids that get through schools and then they can't hold a job because they haven't learned the discipline of get up in the morning.

The people that were socially awkward from my generation, they all had paper routes and that taught them the discipline of work.

I'm a child of the 50s. I was expected to have table manners. There needs to be some expectations for behavior. I'm seeing some children today, they don't push them enough.

I've got a lot of people that are really good at taming animals and working with animals; and they can't explain how they do. They just get a feeling from the animal.

I feel very strongly that we need to give beef cattle a really good life. When they go to slaughter, it needs to be painless.

One big question that's come up is: Has autism increased on the mild side of things? I don't think so -- they've always been here. Some of this is increased detection.

I was fascinated with optical illusions.

Costs for liability insurance are higher than costs for many procedures. There is a need to reform liability laws to stop out-of-control health care costs.

I played around with vegetarianism back in the '70s. One thing, my physiology just got to have animal protein. I get hypoglycemic, I get all light-headed unless I eat animal protein.

Animals do have emotion. But fear tends to be one of the most primal emotions.

The reason why feral kitties are hard to tame is because they have missed socialization the period -- you need to be touching and petting those kittens when they are real young.

In special education, there's too much emphasis placed on the deficit and not enough on the strength.

Some people with autism who don't talk, all they hear are vowel sounds. Like if I said 'cup,' they might just hear 'uh.'

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.

People are getting too far away from the real-world. Politics is just ridiculous, it's totally dysfunctional.

Sometimes you have to go outside your field of study to find the right people.

Nature is cruel but we don't have to be.