Joycelyn Elders Quotes

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

I feel that we can't educate children who are not healthy, and we can't keep them healthy if they're not educated. There has to be a marriage between health and education. You can't learn if your mind is full of unhealthy images from daily life and confusion about right and wrong.

Health is more than absence of disease; it is about economics, education, environment, empowerment, and community. The health and well being of the people is critically dependent upon the health system that serves them. It must provide the best possible health with the least disparities and respond equally well to everyone.

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

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

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 know that more than seventy to eighty percent of women masturbate, and ninety percent of men masturbate, and the rest lie.

The evidence is overwhelming that marijuana can relieve certain types of pain, nausea, vomiting and other symptoms caused by such illnesses as multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS - or by the harsh drugs sometimes used to treat them. And it can do so with remarkable safety. Indeed, marijuana is less toxic than many of the drugs that physicians prescribe every day.

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

Masturbation never got anybody pregnant, does not make anybody go crazy, and what we're about is preventing HIV in our bright young people.

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

The best contraceptive in the world is a good education.

... if you're poor and ignorant, with a child, you're a slave. Meaning that you're never going to get out of it. These women are in bondage to a kind of slavery that the 13th Amendment just didn't deal with. The old master provided food, clothing and health care to the slaves because he wanted them to get up and go to work in the morning. And so on welfare: you get food, clothing and shelter--you get survival, but you can't really do anything else. You can't control your life.

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

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!

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."

You can't keep an ignorant population healthy.

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

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

If I could be the "condom queen" and get every young person who engaged in sex to use a condom in the United States, I would weara crown on my head with a condom on it! I would!

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

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.

We know that there are several predisposing factors to gun violence: poverty, lack of education, lack of good parenting, lack of jobs, living in an environment where violence is seen every day, all the time. And children being born to children are likely to have all of these predisposing factors.

Homicide, often involving guns, is a disease that is the leading cause of death for young black men, and the second-leading cause of death for all people aged fifteen to twenty-four. That makes it the leading health issue, particularly when guns are used in combination with drugs and alcohol. And the statistics show that is most often the case.

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.