Top 150 Temple Grandin Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Temple Grandin

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

— Temple Grandin

103. “One of the big areas I’d like to see a lot more research done on is the sensory problems, and it’s real variable. One kid’s got sound sensitivity; another one can’t tolerate fluorescent lights. I can’t stand scratchy clothes.”

— Temple Grandin

104. “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.”

— Temple Grandin

105. “At the age of three, Tito Mukhopadhyay was diagnosed with severe autism, but his mother, Soma, refused to accept the conventional wisdom of the time that her son would be unable to interact with the outside world. She read to him, taught him to write in English, and challenged him to write his own stories.”

— Temple Grandin

106. “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.”

— Temple Grandin

107. “I tend to be much more in the present and my emotions are simpler. I can be happy, I can be sad, I can be depressed, but there’s a complexity that I don’t have. I don’t brood the same way. Fear is my main emotion.”

— Temple Grandin

108. “I am also a believer in an integrated treatment approach to autism.”

— Temple Grandin

109. “I’ve got a lot of other people who do a lot of things for me, so I’ve gotten to a part in my career where I’m doing a lot of talks because I want to get kids turned on. I want to see these kids, these geeky nerdy kids, go out there and do something.”

— Temple Grandin

110. “I’d rather see a kid get fixated on something they can turn into a career.”

— Temple Grandin

111. “Kanner had cause and effect backward. The child wasn’t behaving in a psychically isolated or physically destructive manner because the parents were emotionally distant. Instead, the.”

— Temple Grandin

112. “Neurotypical people seem to think and feel that it’s okay to be rigid as long as their ideas are shared by enough people.”

— Temple Grandin

113. “It’s OK to be an eccentric; it’s not OK to be a rude and dirty eccentric.”

— Temple Grandin

114. “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.”

— Temple Grandin

115. “There is a tremendous range of children with a PDD label.”

— Temple Grandin

116. “One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills.”

— Temple Grandin

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

— Temple Grandin

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

— Temple Grandin

119. “The “Intense World” paper proposed that if the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responses, including fear, is affected by sensory overload, then certain responses that look antisocial actually aren’t.”

— Temple Grandin

120. “Teachers who work with autistic children need to understand associative thought patterns.”

— Temple Grandin

121. “The Mind of a Mnemonist.”

— Temple Grandin

122. “It is human nature to strive.”

— Temple Grandin

123. “Many of these individuals agree that sensory issues are the primary challenge of autism in their daily lives. There.”

— Temple Grandin

124. “For example, the main reason zebras never got domesticated is that they’re ultra-high-fear. Zebras may bite people and not let go. They injure more people in zoos than the tigers do.15.”

— Temple Grandin

125. “Complicating matters even further, on a day-to-day basis, in the same individual, the sensory sensitivities can change, especially when the person is tired or stressed. These.”

— Temple Grandin

126. “Boys who cry can work for Google. Boys who trash computers cannot. I once was at a science conference, and I saw a NASA scientist who had just found out that his project was canceled – a project he’d worked on for years. He was maybe sixty-five years old, and you know what? He was crying. And I thought, Good for him. That’s why he was able to reach retirement age working in a job he loved.”

— Temple Grandin

127. “Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else’s position or lack of emotionality.”

— Temple Grandin

128. “The Internet may be the best thing yet for improving an autistic person’s social life.”

— Temple Grandin

129. “What a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals.”

— Temple Grandin

130. “When something is “all in your mind,” people tend to think that it’s willful, that it’s something you could control if only you tried harder or if you had been trained differently. I’m hoping that the newfound certainty that autism is in your brain and in your genes will affect public attitudes.”

— Temple Grandin

131. “The body and the brain aren’t two different things, controlled by two completely different sets of genes. Many of the same chemicals that work in your heart and organs also work in your brain, and many genes do one thing.”

— Temple Grandin

132. “People who are attached to each other develop a social dependence on each other that’s based in a physical dependence on brain opiates.”

— Temple Grandin

133. “To summarize this chapter, parents and teachers need to “stretch” individuals on the autism spectrum. They need to be stretched just outside their comfort zone for them to develop.”

— Temple Grandin

134. “Campbell’s Law, which says that any metric used to determine social decision-making will become corrupted by people who want to affect those decisions.”

— Temple Grandin

135. “The diagnosis of autism can sometimes help you better predict a child’s behaviors, but it tells you nothing about their specific way of thinking, their idiosyncrasies, their strengths, or their individual personality.”

— Temple Grandin

136. “Being negative is natural and being 100 percent positive takes work.”

— Temple Grandin

137. “The Asperger’s child at the gifted meeting is doing well in school, but the Asperger’s child at an autism meeting may be in a poor special ed program, bored, and getting into trouble because adults in his life hold lower expectations of his abilities. Unfortunately, in some cases, people are so hung up on the labels attached to students that they teach to these low expectations and aren’t even curious to learn if the child is actually more capable.”

— Temple Grandin

138. “Behavioral trainers never talk about vices and depravity. Behaviorists are some of the most “optimistic’ teachers and trainers there are, because if a person or an animal isn’t learning, a behaviorist is trained to examine what “he” is doing wrong, not what the person or animal is doing wrong. This means that behavioral teachers and trainers don’t blame the student.”

— Temple Grandin

139. “Parents and teachers should look at the child, not the child’s label, and remember that the same genes that produce his Asperger’s may have given the child the capacity to become one of the truly great minds of his generation.”

— Temple Grandin

140. “Instead of making the children do good behaviors by threatening to punish them if they don’t, the teachers watch the children until they spontaneously do a good thing and give them rewards to reinforce the behavior and make them more likely to do that behavior again in the future.”

— Temple Grandin

141. “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.”

— Temple Grandin

142. “Autistic thinking is always detailed and specific. Teachers and parents need to help both children and adults with autism take all the little details they have in their head and put them into categories to form concepts and promote generalization.”

— Temple Grandin

143. “The younger the subject, the earlier the possibility of intervention. The earlier the intervention, the greater the potential effect on the trajectory of an autistic person’s life.”

— Temple Grandin

144. “Do not allow a child or an adult to become defined by a DSM label.”

— Temple Grandin

145. “Think of it this way: the object thinkers build the trains, and the spatial visualizers make them run.”

— Temple Grandin

146. “During meals, I was taught table manners, and I was not allowed to twirl my fork around over my head. The only time I could revert back to autism was for one hour after lunch. The rest of the day, I had to live in a nonrocking, nontwirling world.”

— Temple Grandin

147. “All people want to feel their efforts matter, and individuals with ASD are no different.”

— Temple Grandin

148. “There is often too much emphasis in the world of autism on the deficits of these children and not enough emphasis on developing the special talents that many of them possess.”

— Temple Grandin

149. “The educator’s job is to ask... “well, what IS she like”?”

— Temple Grandin

150. “We’d discuss one unwritten rule and a hundred exceptions would instantaneously appear.”

— Temple Grandin