Daily Inspiration Quote by William J. Brennan, Jr.

Brennan’s line lands like a quiet constitutional reframe: disability isn’t just lodged in bodies, it’s manufactured in the social imagination. The rhetorical move is surgical. He pairs “accumulated myths and fears” with “physical limitations,” not to minimize impairment, but to insist that prejudice can be just as disabling as pain, paralysis, or chronic illness. By putting “myths and fears” on the same moral plane as “actual impairment,” he transforms bias from a private attitude into a public barrier - something law has standing to confront.

The intent is unmistakably legal: to justify Congress treating discrimination against disabled people as a serious civil rights problem, not a matter of charity or medical misfortune. Brennan’s diction does the work. “Accumulated” suggests sedimented history, a long buildup of superstition, stigma, and exclusion that feels natural only because it’s old. “Handicapping” is especially pointed; it turns society into the agent of injury, implying that inaccessibility, job exclusion, and institutionalization aren’t unfortunate side effects but active constraints imposed by others.

Context matters: Brennan is writing in the late-20th-century arc when disability rights advocates were pushing the state to recognize that ramps, hiring practices, and public accommodations are political choices. His subtext is a warning against the comforting fiction that discrimination is rational when it dresses itself up as “health” or “safety.” The line anticipates the Americans with Disabilities Act’s core logic: equal access isn’t a special favor; it’s a correction of society’s own handiwork.