Joycelyn Elders Quotes about Children

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.

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

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

... 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.

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.

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.

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

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.