Temple Grandin Quotes

The best thing a parent of a newly diagnosed child can do is to watch their child without preconceived notions and judgements and learn how the child functions, acts, and reacts to his or her world. (p2)

I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors. (p3)

One thing that worries me is seeing, for example, the guys at the Jet Propulsion Lab who are my age. They are eccentric geeks. What would happen to the younger version of these people today? Would they have a fun job where they're the navigator for the Mars rover or would they be playing video games in a basement somewhere?

if you see a child with autistic-like behaviors at age two and three, the worst thing you can do is just let them sit and watch TV all day. That's just the worst thing you can do. You need to have a teacher working with that child, working on teaching language, working on social interaction, working on getting them interested in different things, and keeping their brain connected to the world.

All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain. (p5)

I believe there is some ultimate ordering force for good in the universe - not a personal thing, not Buddha or Jesus, maybe something like order out of disorder. I like to hope that even if there's no personal afterlife, some energy impression is left in the universe... most people can pass on genes - I can pass on thoughts or what I write.

I don't like radical anything; left or right. I have a radical dislike of radicals.

Breeders need to realize that they can't have everything. There's a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three. You have to pick two. It's true with genetics too. (p200)

I've been doing autism talks for the last 20 years and there still are people out there that do not want to, they can't recognize that these sensory problems are real. That, for some of these kids when that fire alarm goes off, that really hurts the ears, it's a really real thing.

For me and other people on the autism spectrum, sensory experiences that have little or no effect on neurotypical people can be severe life stressors for us. Loud noises hurt my ears like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve. (p57)

The meaning of life is if something that you did made something better.

the things that scare a prey/species animal like cattle are a whole lot of little visual details that people just don't tend to notice. And one of the big problems they used to have is the people just wanted to get out there and yell and scream and push and shove and you know more and more prods. Rather than remove the things that the cattle were afraid of.

(About the workplace) Tyrants who get into power make life miserable for everyone.

I hate violent images in the movies. Since I think in pictures, it is difficult to get these images out of my memory. I do not want this bad stuff in my memory. Reading about violence does not upset me, it is seeing it. Cartoon violence and car crashes have no effect. The images I want to avoid are realistic depictions of torture and cruelty.

You've read about action at a distance, or quantum theory. I've always had the feeling that when I go to a meat plant I must be very careful, because God's watching. Quantum theory will get me.