Explore Quotes by Joycelyn Elders

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

Doctor, I have more education than most white people.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The best contraceptive in the world is a good education.

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."

Gun owners would have to be evaluated by how they scored on written and firing tests, and have to pass the tests in order to own a gun. And I would tax the guns, bullets and the license itself very heavily.

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

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.