David Satcher Quotes

I want the violence among young people in this country to stop - particularly gang violence.

It's not uncommon for young people to expect things. It's part of growing up.

I think that the path that I took was normal in the American society where young women and men are not trained as to how to make the transition from being a girl to being a woman, from being a boy to being a man. And so I think that most young people in America live by trial and error, and not by parental instruction, community guidance.

I have never seen a hopeful person join a gang.

I am rather in favour of dealing with teenage hooliganism.

Head Start graduates are more likely to graduate from high school and less likely to need special education, repeat a grade, or commit crimes in adolescence.

The thing about youthful offenders is that no one seems to care about them. Most people don't like adolescents - even the good ones can be snarky and unpleasant. Combine the antipathy we feel toward the average teenager with the fear inspired by youth violence, and you have a population that no one wants to deal with.

I wasn't a bad kid. I was a good kid. But I had gotten in a lot of fights 'cause in the neighborhood I grew up in, that wasn't equated with bad behavior almost. I mean, we'd fought like it was another game. 'You wanna play stick ball today?' 'Nah, let's go fight.'

I think that we should take the tragedy that happened in Newtown and have a full comprehensive dialogue about all issues, whether it has to do with mental health, whether it has to do with the social decline of our young people and some of the things that they are exposed to, whether it has to do with the firearms and guns.

What we have to do is stop children from killing children.

We can either allow our youth to shoot baskets or watch them shoot people.

I have seen bright young people all over this country in an ocean surrounded by the sharks of drugs, alcohol, violence, homicide, suicide, AIDS and teenage pregnancy while we argue over whose values we are going to teach.

I founded Homeboy Industries in 1988 after I buried my first young person killed in our streets because of gang violence.

Our young people live in a world in which there's violence wherever you turn.

Yeah, I was a delinquent. It was when I was in the ninth grade. I was doing stupid stuff, and the cops came into the class. I was humiliated more than anything.

I have a thing about working with young people. I adore them.

Since 1975, violence has been recognized as a public health problem, in large part to former Surgeon Generals Dr. Koop and Dr. Satcher's pioneering efforts to make the health approach a national priority. Since then, we've seen that violence can be curbed - and stopped - if we treat it as we would any other epidemic health concern.

We've got to look to our educational programs and focus on doing what we can to stem violence in the schools.

I was an angry kid, and boxing kept me out of trouble.

I want to bear down on violent crime, in all its aspects from terrorism to sexual offences but definitely knife and gun crime, particularly as it affects young people.

Many, many individuals will report starting to form their lifelong interests around adolescence. Why that is, researchers don't fully know. But if you can take a trip down memory lane and see what interested you, that's at least a clue as to where your interest may begin to develop.

At sixteen, I was a funny, skinny little thing, all eyelashes and legs. And then, suddenly people told me it was gorgeous. I thought they had gone mad.

I'm still in the middle of the transition. I'm still in man-boy mode. And that won't go away for a while. But it's a fun time to be in, because it's very rare that people get to work through this time. It's rare to see a John Cusack in Say Anything. It's rare that you'd find an actor right in the cusp of the child-to adult transition, just got through puberty, just getting into a different way of life. There's few movies like that, and few roles like that, so it's going to be tough to pick and choose. I guess the goal is good people, work with good people.

To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs.

The missionary experience is part of Christian formation and it is important for adolescents and young people to be able to live it personally.