Quotes By Major Owens

It was the best route to get folks to understand segregation fast. Civil rights and women's rights had a clear history. Making the transition to rights for people with disabilities became easier because we had the history of the other two.

We need to get ready for a world where terrorism will not ever fully go away.

What is our greatest enemy? Segregation.

I will continue my activities related to education in one way or another. I certainly would have at the top my agenda, with respect to education, the need to do much better with modern educational technology.

The kind of society which we still have is maybe, in some cases, getting worse. Competition is becoming a virtue. Intense competition drives people to go more and more into self-interest. Even to see other folks as competition.

We can not wait until we have enough trained people willing to work at a teacher's salary and under conditions imposed upon teachers in order to improve what happens in the classroom.

Competition is such a virtue, and everybody's so busy competing, they have no time for compassion.

People's lives have to change as a result of this legislation.

Therefore, you are not training young people for the world of today and the world of tomorrow unless you are doing proven technology training. That is one of the reasons I'm so concerned.

The ownership of computers in the home is far less than the statistics show, because usually when the computer breaks down once, that is the end of it for a long, long time. They do not have the money or incentive to get the computer repaired.

Those involved in the program are interested in how to use photography, videos, the Internet, film, and anything related to communications and transmission of information in the most up-to-date modern ways.

I have a great deal of respect and admiration for people who put themselves on the line.

The problem was just a mean attitude that festers and has to be challenged.

I do not think we are ever going to be able to, for a long time, get the kind of quality of school personnel that we need in our schools, especially in the areas of science and math. One of the answers to that problem is to use more educational technology.

In preparation for it, we need to have folks who are trained, we need facilities, equipment and supplies, that are going to be built into our society, and we are going to spend a lot of money on it.

Our government just won't enforce civil rights laws. The laws will be ignored.

The first place to start is on enforcement. We who got the ADA passed did the hard part, the heavy lifting.

Technology tools such as laptops are the kind of help that we need. A program that provides laptops for all youngsters would close a gap that most of us are not aware of, or will not admit to, which is a tremendous gap in the poor communities.

You have no power at all if you do not exercise constant power.

The whole community of people with disabilities was alive, politically alive. I give Justin Dart credit for that. He traveled to every state in the country. He really made people with disabilities understand that they had some political power.

There's a kind of sick security some people get out of keeping away from people with disabilities. They are running away from any situation that's not totally pure and all-American and that requires them to do any thinking.

It is very difficult to get legislation passed. But then the danger always is that you have no power at all if you do not exercise constant power.

Education technology and school construction go together. Modernization, updating education facilities, and making a capital investment in education are all included.

We can do it better, more consistently, and in the end, it will cost us less because the students that we produce will be superior to those without technology experience.

Excitement in education and student productivity, the ability to get a result that you want from students, go together and cannot be separated.

Children are already accustomed to a world that moves faster and is more exciting than anything a teacher in front of a classroom can do.

I would like to spend my next two years showing how the aim of making technology available to every young person can be built into the effort to make our nation more secure. That is my latest concern and what I will be pushing over the next two years.

There's a whole set of values, spawned by the vocal and highly visible Republicans, that appeal to the worst in people. Our society is moving in that direction.

People didn't always see a person with a disability who had to use a ramp or elevator as people who have been given unnecessary privileges. But I run into that often now. People are saying, 'Why do we have to go to great expense for these people?'

He testified that when you looked at it through the eyes of 'let's do it,' the costs were very small. They were less than they'd had to spend to host a convention of transportation executives. The cost was not that great.