My teachers say I’m addled…my father thought I was stupid, and I almost decided I must be a dunce.—Thomas Edison (the famous inventor pictured when he was a lad)
He told me that his teachers reported that…he was mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in his foolish dreams.–Hans Albert Einstein, on his father, Albert Einstein
I, myself, was always recognized…as the “slow one” in the family. It was quite true, and I knew it and accepted it. Writing and spelling were always terribly difficult for me. My letters were without originality. I was…an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until this day.—Agatha Christie
My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.—William Butler Yeats, poet
Willie was sent to lessons in spelling and grammar, but he never learned to spell. To the end of his life he produced highly idiosyncratic versions of words.--Biographer A. Norman Jeffares on William Butler Yeats
I grew up in a school system…where nobody understood the meaning of learning disorder. In the West Indies, I was constantly being physically abused because the whipping of students was permitted.—Harry Belafonte, singer and actor
Since I was the stupidest kid in my class, it never occurred to me to try and be perfect, so I’ve always been happy as a writer just to entertain myself. That’s an easier place to start.–Stephen J. Cannell, screenwriter, producer, & director
Kids made fun of me because I was dark skinned, had a wide nose, and was dyslexic. Even as an actor, it took me a long time to realize why words and letters got jumbled in my mind and came out differently.—Danny Glover, actor
I barely made it through school. I read real slow. But I like to find things that nobody else has found, like a dinosaur egg that has an embryo inside. Well, there are 36 of them in the world, and I found 35.—Dr. John R. Horner, American paleontologist
I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.—William James, psychologist and philosopher
I just barely got through school. The problem was a learning disability, at a time when there was nowhere to get help.—Bruce Jenner, Olympic gold medalist
Young George…although he was bright and intelligent and bursting with energy, he was unable to read and write. Patton’s wife corrected his spelling, his punctuation, and his grammar.–Biographer Martin Blumenson on General George Patton
My problem was reading very slowly. My parents said “Take as long as you need. As long as you’re going to read, just keep at it.” We didn’t know about learning disabilities back then.—Roger Wilkins, head of the Pulitzer Prize Board
As a child, I was called stupid and lazy. On the SAT I got 159 out of 800 in math. My parents had no idea that I had a learning disability.—Henry Winkler, actor
