Joycelyn Elders Quotes

The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened. A recent article in Poverty, published by the Child Poverty Action Group, showed that a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and to bring them up.

The fry of wandering beggars that grow up idly and hurtfully and burdenous to the Realm, might be unladen and better bred up.

The single best indicator of whether or not a child is going to be in poverty or not is whether or not they were raised by a two-parent household or a single parent household.

Part of the reason young people are getting involved with gangs, leading to the use of guns and knives, is not the lack of stop and search but the individualistic, consumerist society we live in.

Watch our children while they kill each other with guns they bought at Wal-Mart.

I don't want anybody to be confused that the issue of police and community is one part of a broader set of issues. Our children need to be properly educated. They need to be trained so that they can get jobs and be functional.

Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works.

70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.

In the gun game, we are the most hunted. The river of blood that washes the streets of our nation flows mostly from the bodies of our black children.

I'll tell you what, our inner cities are so, so bad right now. The danger, the crime, the lack of education, no jobs. African Americans are living in hell in our - in the inner cities. I mean, they're living - they're living in hell. You walk to the store for a loaf of bread; you get shot.

Around 80% of Liberians are unemployed and only half of all children go to primary school. Just one in 20 go on to secondary school. Young children are on the streets instead of in the classrooms. We are not giving them the opportunity to learn and they will struggle to get jobs when they grow up.

There are five issues that make a fist of a hand that can knock America out cold. They're lack of jobs, obesity, diabetes, homelessness, and lack of good education.

We cannot continue to trade our children’s lives against the gun industry’s profits…. It is time to stop killing our children.

It might be that my poverty is my fault—the result of my ineptitude or my laziness. However, is there any way that the poverty that my child is condemned to is his fault? He certainly does not have the same opportunity as my child would if I were rich. But where then is our equality of opportunity?

…it would be much better to enable every man to earn his own living, instead of being driven to the awful necessity of stealing and then dying for it.

If you are a pregnant teenage poor girl, you will not likely ever get out of poverty. Nor will your children. Birth control can be the most cost effective anti-poverty possibility that we have.

The children of those people [long term unemployed] have less education, earn less, have higher unemployment. The problems are visited upon the children

Moms that get evicted are depressed and have higher rates of depressive symptoms two years later. That has to affect their interactions with their kids and their sense of happiness. You add all that together, and it's just really obvious to me that eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.

Most poor people in America are white. The family breakdown issue is an issue that crosses all sorts of racial lines. High school dropout issues. But because of the flow of events which involve the racial component, we've sometimes confused racial issues with other issues which are trans-racial.

If a mother or a caregiver does not have a job that pays a living wage and they cannot afford child care, that is unacceptable.

We are going to trace more effectively, how these guns are ending up on the streets, to unscrupulous gun dealers, who often times are selling to straw purchasers. And cracking down on the various loopholes that exist in terms of background checks for children, the mentally ill.

People would rather live in an area of poverty than in an area where there are no jobs, because if they live in poverty, they have a certain sense of hope they can get out of it. If there are no jobs, there's no hope. And bad things come from that.

The truth is, the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82%. But it isn't a government spending program. It's called marriage.

It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid... These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to take care of the school.