Some of the world's greatest men and women have been saddled with disabilities and adversities but have managed to overcome them.

• Cripple him, and you have a Sir Walter Scott.
• Lock him in a prison cell, and you have a John Bunyan.
• Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have a George Washington.
• Raise him in abject poverty, and you have an Abraham Lincoln.
• Subject him to bitter religious prejudice, and you have a Benjamin Disraeli.
• Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes a Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• Burn him so severely in a schoolhouse fire that the doctors say he will never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham, who set a world's record in 1934 for running a mile in 4 minutes, 4.4 seconds.
• Deafen a genius composer, and you have a Ludwig van Beethoven.
• Have him or her born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Booker T. Washington, a Harriet Tubman, a Marian Anderson, or a George Washington Carver.
• Make him the first child to survive in a poor Italian family of eighteen children, and you have an Enrico Caruso.
• Have him born of parents who survived a Nazi concentration camp, paralyze him from the waist down when he is four, and you have an incomparable concert violinist, Iczhak Perlman.
• Call him a slow learner, "retarded," and write him off as ineducable, and you have an Albert Einstein.