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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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Joycelyn Elders
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: August 13
Former Surgeon General Of The United States
Pediatrician
Physician
Politician
Scientist
Minnie Joycelyn Elders
Thinking
Stores
Doctors
Clerk
Seen
Clerks
Black
Elders
Didn
Clothings
Even
Clothing
Never
Store
Think
Doctor

More quotes by 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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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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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
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Marijuana is beneficial to many patients
Joycelyn Elders
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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
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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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If you say children wouldn't know anything about masturbation on their own, you've never changed a little boy's diaper.
Joycelyn Elders
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The best contraceptive in the world is a good education.
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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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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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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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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You can't educate people that are not healthy. But you certainly can't keep them healthy if they're not educated.
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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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
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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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Guns kill more teenagers than the other big killers - heart disease, cancer, and AIDS - combined.
Joycelyn Elders
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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
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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