Joycelyn Elders

"Handguns are a public health issue."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"We must stop this love affair with the fetus."

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

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

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

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

"They are boycotting common sense."

"We know that more than 70 to 80% of women masturbate, and 90% of men masturbate, and the rest lie."

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

"Absolutely. You can do both. I feel that parents should educate their children about their sexuality and teach them the things they want them to know. But so often, what they're taught is what I was taught - to just say no. We have been taught abstinence only. We've been taught nothing about protection from diseases or anything. We've been taught nothing about contraception. And, you know, we say well, if we tell them about it, they'll do it. Well, if you've got the highest rates in the world, that says you're already doing it."

"I think that we need to look at health - sexual health - as a part of our overall health, and I don't feel that you can really be healthy unless you are sexually healthy. And I truly feel that we need to start educating our children about sex from kindergarten through 12th grade, so that they can respect their sexuality and protect their sexuality so that they can be - have sexual health throughout their lives. Other countries do it. Why do we have to have the highest teenage pregnancy, highest rates of STDs, the highest rates of HIV in our adolescents? It's because we feel that ignorance is bliss, and it's not bliss. We got to educate our young people."

""I grew up on a farm in a three-room shack. I was the oldest of eight children. We were very poor. We didn’t have running water. We didn’t have electricity, so we didn’t have TV or radio. No one had health care. There were no health facilities for miles and miles. The first time I saw a doctor was when I was a freshman in college. So I couldn’t grow up wanting to go into public health, or even wanting to be a doctor, because I’d never even heard of that. You can’t be what you can’t see"."

"I believe that the reason we do not see health care as a human right is that our country is run by a class of white men who don’t understand the problems of *needing* and *not having*. Perhaps they’ve never been there themselves. Nobody wants to be poor. We all want food, clothing, and shelter. And health care, too."

"""A core belief of mine is the importance of honesty. When we stop talking openly about sex, we stop communicating important information to our young people. Then you have worse reproductive health, more teenage pregnancy, higher rates of HIV/AID"."

""__ I think that we have made a lot of progress. But you know, it took thousands of years to get here. Can you imagine that in 1960 it was illegal for married people to use condoms"."

"I heard on the way over here, by the way, that they've come up with a new nominee for surgeon general: Pee-Wee Herman, is....You don't think that would have happened if it weren't for the fact that you were all elected do you? This is a sensitive subject and I am not gonna mention it because she got canned for it, but I'll tell ya, she said much worse than this. And she said far stupider things, like “The way to combat crime is with safer bullets, with safer guns.”"

"I certainly agree with the suggestion made by the former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders that a public dialogue on the decriminalization of drugs is absolutely necessary. As it stands today, people are punished because they have done harm to themselves. The "crime problem" can only be addressed ultimately by the eradication of poverty, by the eradication of the circumstances that lead people to commit the kinds of crimes for which most are sent to prison."