Joycelyn Elders Quotes & Sayings

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. — Joycelyn Elders

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

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

My biggest challenge is to educate the American people, to make access to health care available for all, and to make sure that prevention plays a big part in health care. In the case of guns, prevention means we prevent homicides and devastating, expensive gun injuries by preventing those who shouldn't have guns from getting their hands on guns. — Joycelyn Elders

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. — Joycelyn Elders

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! — Joycelyn Elders

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

I always say my God will take care of me. If it's my time I'll go, and if it's not I won't. I feel that He really has a lot of important things for me to do. And He's going to make sure that I'm here to do them. — Joycelyn Elders

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

[We must] deal with all of the contributing factors to gun violence as a whole, because it's like a leaky bucket - if you've got a bucket with six holes shot through it, [and] you plug up five, you've still got a leaky bucket. — Joycelyn Elders

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. — Joycelyn Elders

If you can't control your reproduction, you can't control your life. — Joycelyn Elders

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. — Joycelyn Elders

Guns are far too accessible and too readily available. There are over 200 million guns in our society - and that's just the legal ones, the ones we know about. Every ten seconds, another gun is produced. And every fourteen minutes, some person in America dies from gun-inflicted action. — Joycelyn Elders

I've pretty much always used my positions as a bully pulpit. What that means is strongly advocating for the things I feel are really important. Gun violence, to me, is the highest-priority public-health issue, and I have to make sure Congress is aware of it, the American people are aware of it, the president is aware of it, and that we all begin together to develop policies to exterminate the disease - the epidemic, really - of gun violence. — Joycelyn Elders

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. — Joycelyn Elders

You can't keep an ignorant population healthy. — Joycelyn Elders

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. — Joycelyn Elders

The best contraceptive in the world is a good education. — Joycelyn Elders

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

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. — Joycelyn Elders

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. — Joycelyn Elders

Black women have always found that in the social order of things we're the least likely to be believed
by anyone. — Joycelyn Elders

Who is the NRA anyway? They are usually middle-income people who only think of themselves, who want to have no government, really, except self-rule by themselves. I think that little cracks are starting to emerge in the NRA armor. — Joycelyn Elders

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." — Joycelyn Elders

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. — Joycelyn Elders

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. — Joycelyn Elders

What I can do is to go out and talk about the problems and solutions, make people aware of the scope of the problems, get them to become advocates for a turnaround, and convince them to develop an action plan, targeted to their community, to deal with young people. [They need to] find out what the kids want to do - dances, midnight-basketball leagues. — Joycelyn Elders

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

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

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

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

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

I want to make it as hard as possible. 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. — Joycelyn Elders

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

Marijuana is beneficial to many patients — Joycelyn Elders

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

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. — Joycelyn Elders

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

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

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. — Joycelyn Elders

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

I support a total ban on handgun ownership for anyone under eighteen. Uzis should be absolutely banned from entering this country. Automatic weapons of any kind should not be for sale in America. For that matter, toy Uzis should not be available for kids, either. There would be a minimum seven-day waiting period between applying for a gun permit and obtaining a gun. — Joycelyn Elders

Nobody with a criminal record would ever be allowed to buy a gun. All assault weapons would be banned, completely. And everybody who still possesses a gun license would receive mandatory education and training by professionals on how to handle a gun. After all, I can't drive my car until I pass a test proving I know how to handle a car. — Joycelyn Elders

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. — Joycelyn Elders

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

I don't know how anybody can say that who looks at what's happening to our young people and what's happening to our country, all because of guns. The NRA is putting themselves in a position where people will no longer trust them. They've been trusted in the past, but now their credibility is on the line. — Joycelyn Elders

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! — Joycelyn Elders

We have a multiheaded dragon in our midst that for too long has been waging a domestic war on our young, our poor, our elderly, and our underserved. The faces of this dragon sometimes manifest themselves as poverty, the source of the most pervasive health problem we have in America. Sometimes they manifest themselves as diseases such as AIDS, sometimes as violence, and sometimes of racism, sexism, and classism. For too long our "isms" have pushed our young, our poor, and our minorities to the back of the social justice bus. I think it is time for us to ask the question "Do we feel that every American should have a right to health care?" In our society, we feel that every criminal has a right to a lawyer. Shouldn't we feel that every sick person has right to a doctor? — Joycelyn Elders

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

We can begin to address the issue of guns by teaching our young people how to deal with situations in nonviolent ways. Someone said to me the other day, "What our adolescents need is not so much health care, but healthy caring," and I agree. Parents and churches need to provide that. Curricula in our schools [need to] provide that. — Joycelyn Elders

Handguns are a public health issue. — Joycelyn Elders