Joycelyn Elders Quotes

We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus and start worrying about children.

You can't educate a child who isn't healthy, and you can't keep a child healthy who isn't educated.

It is often easier for our children to obtain a gun than it is to find a good school.

Health is more than the absence of disease. Health is about jobs and employment, education, the environment, and all of those things that go into making us healthy.

We've tried ignorance for a thousand years. It's time we try education.

I've heard Eric Clapner, ... I think it was a wonderful thing that Eric Clapner the musician did...So I think that's the wonderful part about it, but listen - I like Eric Clapner!

You can't educate people that are not healthy. But you certainly can't keep them healthy if they're not educated.

I'm against abstinence programs because I really consider "abstinence only" child abuse.

Given a choice between hearing my daughter say "I'm pregnant" or "I used a condom", most mothers would get up in the middle of the night and buy them herself.

If men went through menopause, we'd know everything about it, but we still don't even know if we should be taking hormones.

As long as I was in Washington I never met anybody that I thought was good enough, who knew enough, or who loved enough to make sexual decisions for anybody else.

Guns kill more teenagers than the other big killers - heart disease, cancer, and AIDS - combined.

The best contraceptive in the world is a good education.

You can't keep an ignorant population healthy.

But I'm saying we are loosing the people who are going to pay my social security. And that bothers me.

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

If you can't control your reproduction, you can't control your life.

Once I had a professor say to me, "You know you have as much education as a lot of white people." I answered, "Doctor, I have more education than most white people."

I think we should have a very, very heavy tax on handguns and on bullets.

You can't be what you don't see. I didn't think about being a doctor. I didn't even think about being a clerk in a store, I'd never seen a black clerk in a clothing store.

[On masturbation:] I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught.

If you say children wouldn't know anything about masturbation on their own, you've never changed a little boy's diaper.

Handguns are a public health issue.

... black women have always found that in the social order of things we're the least likely to be believed--by anyone.

Judge Thomas was a man who had used the system to get where he wanted to be, but then felt that everyone else should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

I want every child that's born in the world to be planned and wanted.

As a Christian, as an individual, as a doctor, I am absolutely opposed to the death penalty.

Doctor, I have more education than most white people.

Certainly we have to find some kind of warning to put on guns for sale. And that's not too far-fetched. But what I really want to do is take the guns out of the hands of irresponsible people.

How do you get rid of the trash? It's out there in society, it's going on every day. You can educate children an awful lot easier than you can get rid of the trash.