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You can't keep an ignorant population healthy.

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
Ignorant
Population
Healthy
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More quotes by 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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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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[On masturbation:] I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught.
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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[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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Marijuana is beneficial to many patients
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The best contraceptive in the world is a good education.
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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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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Handguns are a public health issue.
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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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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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