Quotes from C. Everett Koop

That is why we are working with these various groups that have volunteers. We can get a lot of these things done. Nobody has dropped out, and a lot of people would like to join. We now know what each other does.

The health care industry can play a great role in this by being aware of the fact that these children form perhaps the most neglected group of people in the country, largely because it is hard to find them.

In thirty-five years of medicine I have never seen one case where abortion was necessary to save a mother's life.

The baby's life is never willfully destroyed because the mother's life is in danger.

If you want to say how can we step into childhood and make it better for them, I would start at the activity level. I'd like to say let your kids go out and play.

Your choice of diet can influence your long term health prospects more than any other action you might take.

The right of smokers to smoke ends where their behavior affects the health and well-being of others.

There are all kinds of things you can do to marry literacy with health.

The best prescription is knowledge.

You can't talk of the dangers of snake poisoning and not mention snakes.

All of the western world raises its children uncircumcised and it seems logical that, with the extent of health knowledge in those countries, such a practice must be safe.

The target audience goes back to conception. That means pre-natal care, safe delivery, post-natal screening, and the ordinary stuff you do in pediatrics.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has been in existence for most of this century.

Cigarette smoking is clearly identified as the chief, preventable cause of death in our society.

My experience with the Junior League, when I worked in Philadelphia for four years in reference to children's things, is that whenever they were asked they responded. They always responded with sincerity, and they did a good job.

Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation

Health care is vital to all of us some of the time, but public health is vital to all of us all of the time

At a time when we are pleading with foreign governments to stop the export of cocaine, it is the height of hypocrisy for the United States to export tobacco.

When a child shows up for school, and is not physically and mentally ready to learn, he or she never catches up.

If you have a kid who goes to kindergarten and doesn't know what a circle is, doesn't know what red and green are, and doesn't know what right and left are, by the time he learns those things, the rest of the class is far ahead of him.

The thing that reinforces my belief about that is having worked the last four years with the Safe Kids Campaign on a national basis. I am so amazed at what these little kids do in keeping their parents alerted to what they are there for.

The Carnegie Foundation is well aware of the fact that their reports frequently find their way to dusty archives in academic institutions, but occasionally people pick up a segment of a report and act upon it.

There have been some good studies done in California with Hispanic parents where in the course of a year, they have changed their entire nutritional intake for the better. The kid becomes, in a sense, the bridge between the educational process and the home.

One of the things we want to do is find ways, first, to impress these parents how important it is to have children in a situation where they can respond to them and, second, to bring intergenerational relationships into play.