Top 150 Temple Grandin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I strongly recommend that students with autism get involved in special interest clubs in some of the areas they naturally excel at. Being with people who share your interests makes socializing easier.”

— Temple Grandin

52. “Autism’s an important part of who I am, but I’m a college professor and an animal scientist first. And I wouldn’t want to change ’cause I like the logical way I think.”

— Temple Grandin

53. “I think that the definition of autism is too broad. You got to remember, autism definition is a behavioral profiling.”

— Temple Grandin

54. “From a scientific standpoint, Aspergers and autism are one syndrome. Aspergers is part of the autism spectrum, not a separate disorder.”

— Temple Grandin

55. “Language for me narrates the pictures in my mind. When I work on designing livestock equipment I can test run that equipment in my head like 3-D virtual reality. In fact, when I was in college I used to think that everybody was able to do that.”

— Temple Grandin

56. “I use my mind to solve problems and invent things.”

— Temple Grandin

57. “You can be honest without sharing your opinions on everything.”

— Temple Grandin

58. “If I did not have my work, I would not have my life.”

— Temple Grandin

59. “I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff.”

— Temple Grandin

60. “Some children may need a behavioral approach, whereas other children may need a sensory approach.”

— Temple Grandin

61. “What I’ve tried to do is combine both my personal experiences with scientific research. I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.”

— Temple Grandin

62. “Autism is an extremely variable disorder.”

— Temple Grandin

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

— Temple Grandin

64. “If you start using a medication in a person with autism, you should see an obvious improvement in behavior in a short period of time. If you do not see an obvious improvement, they probably should not be taking the stuff. It is that simple.”

— Temple Grandin

65. “One of the things I want to do is be a decent role model. I’ve got a lot of emails and stuff from children. They look up to me. Kids get different labels and things like that and I want those kids to succeed.”

— Temple Grandin

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

— Temple Grandin

67. “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.”

— Temple Grandin

68. “In dealing with autism, I’m certainly not saying we should lose sight of the need to work on deficits, But the focus on deficits is so intense and so automatic that people lose sight of the strengths.”

— Temple Grandin

69. “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.”

— Temple Grandin

70. “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.”

— Temple Grandin

71. “Research has shown that a barren environment is much more damaging to baby animals than it is to adult animals. It does not hurt the adult animals the same way it damages babies.”

— Temple Grandin

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

— Temple Grandin

73. “When kids are really little, they all look the same. No speech, no social relatedness, cannot emphasize enough the importance of early educational intervention.”

— Temple Grandin

74. “My thinking pattern always starts with specifics and works toward generalization in an associational and nonsequential way.”

— Temple Grandin

75. “Eye contact is still difficult for me in noisy rooms because it interferes with hearing. It’s like my brain’s wiring lets only one sense function or the other, but sometimes not both at the same time. In noisy rooms, I have to concentrate on hearing. Some.”

— Temple Grandin

76. “Sometimes we forget about common sense. Autism is used too much as an excuse for bad behavior.”

— Temple Grandin

77. “Dogs serve people, but people serve cats.”

— Temple Grandin

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

— Temple Grandin

79. “All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.”

— Temple Grandin

80. “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.”

— Temple Grandin

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

— Temple Grandin

82. “I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result.”

— Temple Grandin

83. “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.”

— Temple Grandin

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

— Temple Grandin

85. “And while we are on the subject of medication you always need to look at risk versus benefit.”

— Temple Grandin

86. “My grandfather was an engineer who invented the automatic pilot for airplanes.”

— Temple Grandin

87. “People can live up to high standards, but they can’t live up to perfection.”

— Temple Grandin

88. “When you take a drug to treat high blood pressure or diabetes, you have an objective test to measure blood pressure and the amount of sugar in the blood. It is straight-forward. With autism, you are looking for changes in behavior.”

— Temple Grandin

89. “To destroy other people’s culture is to rob them of immortality.”

— Temple Grandin

90. “Children between the ages of five to ten years are even more variable. They are going to vary from very high functioning, capable of doing normal school work, to nonverbal who have all kinds of neurological problems.”

— Temple Grandin

91. “I obtain great satisfaction out of using my intellect.”

— Temple Grandin

92. “People need to learn how to work, learn how to support themselves. I think it’s just fine to be eccentric.”

— Temple Grandin

93. “I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people’s behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution.”

— Temple Grandin

94. “Every person with autism is unique, with a different profile of strengths and challenges.”

— Temple Grandin

95. “A much more meaningful perspective is to teach this population the academic and interpersonal skills they need to be functional in the world and use their talents to the best of their ability.”

— Temple Grandin

96. “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.”

— Temple Grandin

97. “One of my sensory problems was hearing sensitivity, where certain loud noises, such as a school bell, hurt my ears. It sounded like a dentist drill going through my ears.”

— Temple Grandin

98. “If you have autism in the family history, you still vaccinate. Delay it a bit, space them out.”

— Temple Grandin

99. “People wouldn’t have become who we are today if we hadn’t coevolved with dogs.”

— Temple Grandin

100. “Seeking is a combination of emotions people usually think of as being different: wanting something really good, looking forward to getting something really good and curiosity. Seeking gives you the energy to go after your goals.”

— Temple Grandin