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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

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Joycelyn Elders
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: August 13
Former Surgeon General Of The United States
Pediatrician
Physician
Politician
Scientist
Minnie Joycelyn Elders
Teaching
Education
White
Much
Professor
People
Answered
Professors
Doctor
Doctors

More quotes by Joycelyn Elders

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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
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You can't educate a child who isn't healthy, and you can't keep a child healthy who isn't educated.
Joycelyn Elders
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I want every child that's born in the world to be planned and wanted.
Joycelyn Elders
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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
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You can't keep an ignorant population healthy.
Joycelyn Elders
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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
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[On masturbation:] I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught.
Joycelyn Elders
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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
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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
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It is often easier for our children to obtain a gun than it is to find a good school.
Joycelyn Elders
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Guns kill more teenagers than the other big killers - heart disease, cancer, and AIDS - combined.
Joycelyn Elders
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We know that more than seventy to eighty percent of women masturbate, and ninety percent of men masturbate, and the rest lie.
Joycelyn Elders
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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
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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
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[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
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Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.
Joycelyn Elders
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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
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... black women have always found that in the social order of things we're the least likely to be believed--by anyone.
Joycelyn Elders
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But I'm saying we are loosing the people who are going to pay my social security. And that bothers me.
Joycelyn Elders
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The best contraceptive in the world is a good education.
Joycelyn Elders