Public Health Quotes

1. "The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease."
Author: Ashley Montagu

2. "All I'm asking for is the law that's been on the books for the last 33 years, no public funding for abortion. We are both saying the same thing, pro-life, pro-choice. Let's find the language that works for both of us so we can pass health care."
Author: Bart Stupak

3. "Clearly, Mayor Bloomberg did some things right. I think he did a very good job on public health. He did a very good job on environment. I think he was right to achieve mayoral control of education. I don't think he then applied it the right way."
Author: Bill De Blasio

4. "We need strong public health institutions to respond to any challenge. We need to deal with critical infrastructure. The reality is that very little money has flowed to communities to help our first responders; to help our hospitals; to help the public health infrastructure."
Author: Bob Menendez

5. "America has survived and grown stronger through September 11th and subsequent wars with Afghanistan and Iraq and those who seek to do us harm. We have faced - and met - tremendous challenges ramping up a public health and safety system to protect Americans from future threats."
Author: Christopher Bond

6. "I can support co-ops if they want to do it as we've known co-ops in America for 150 years - where they serve the purposes of the consuming public, whether it's health care or whether it's co-ops as we know them in the Midwest, providing electricity or to sell supplies to farmer."
Author: Chuck Grassley

7. "Exercise, from a public health perspective, is an unmitigated failure. The world's longest-lived people live in environments that nudge them into more movement. They don't use power tools, they do their own yard work, they grow a garden."
Author: Dan Buettner

8. "Poor health was not just the result of random acts, bad luck, bad behavior or unfortunate genetics. Deliberate public policy decision about housing, education, parks and streets were the key drivers of racial differences in mortality. Crime kept people off the streets and limited their ability to exercise. The lack of grocery stores limited dietary choices. The lack of primary care doctors and specialists in these communities made chronic disease care more difficult. The degradation and loss of hospital services in these communities affected hospital-based outcomes. … The chronic underfunding of critical health services at Cook County Hospital and other safety-net providers contributed to these poor outcomes as well. The deleterious impact of social structures such as urban poverty and racism on health has been called 'structural violence."
Author: David A. Ansell

9. "The Los Angeles parade would begin in Griffith Park, where a large crowd would assemble and the speeches would be given. Every politician of consequence would be there. There was no way they would miss a chance to publicly praise the troops and honor those who had lost their lives in service.Some of the tributes would be sincere and heartfelt, and some less so. But participating in the event, vowing undying support for the U.S. military, was an absolute must to maintain political viability. It was okay to vote to cut funds for veterans' healthcare, but don't dare miss a chance to jump on the Memorial Day bandwagon."
Author: David Rosenfelt

10. "A public option is essential to creating the cost-savings necessary to offset the cost of providing all Americans access to affordable health care."
Author: Diana DeGette

11. "Even as a partisan Republican, I'm not sure a 40-year run is healthy for either party."
Author: Ed Gillespie

12. "There is much that public policy can do to support American entrepreneurs. Health insurance reform will make it easier for entrepreneurs to take a chance on a new business without putting their family's health at risk. Tort reform will make it easier to take prudent risks on new products in a number of sectors."
Author: Eric Ries

13. "What I tried to make clear in Good Calories, Bad Calories was that nutrition and obesity research lost its way after the Second World War with the evaporation of the European community of scientists and physicians that did pioneering work in those disciplines. It has since resisted all attempts to correct it. As a result, the individuals involved in this research have not only wasted decades of time, and effort, and money but have done incalculable damage along the way. Their beliefs have remained imperious to an ever-growing body of evidence that refutes them while being embraced by public-health authorities and translated into precisely the wrong advice about what to eat and, more important, what not to eat if we want to maintain a healthy weight and live a long and healthy life."
Author: Gary Taubes

14. "Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories may be rigorously tested in the next twenty years. If confirmed, it will be another decade or so after that, at least, before our public health authorities actively change their official explanation for why we get fat, how that leads to illness, and what we have to do to avoid or reverse those fates. As I was told by a professor of nutrition at New York University after on of my lectures, the kind of change I'm advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted."
Author: Gary Taubes

15. "As Mayor, I will lead city government, businesses, and community groups to support innovative projects that will make San Francisco streets and public places vibrant and healthy."
Author: Gavin Newsom

16. "Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us? Brought peace!"
Author: Graham Chapman

17. "This is a historic moment in global public health, demonstrating the international will to tackle a threat to health head on."
Author: Gro Harlem Brundtland

18. "When elected officials abandon our environment and ruin our natural resources, public health is endangered. I know the importance of providing a clean environment for our children; I have attended more than one funeral for a child who has died from an asthma attack."
Author: Gwen Moore

19. "It is easy for journalism to be morally casual, even as it makes large moral claims for itself. So when journalism is accused by those it serves of privileging sensation before significance, celebrity before achievement, intrusion before purposeful investigation and entertainment before reliability, the charge demands a response. Journalism stands accused of being not so much a public service as a public health hazard."
Author: Ian Hargreaves

20. "The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentleman or a man are to sacrifice estate, ease, health, and applause, and even life, to the sacred calls of his country."
Author: James Otis

21. "The public health of five million children should not be left to luck or chance."
Author: Jamie Oliver

22. "In Illinois, community, migrant, homeless and public housing health centers operate 268 primary care sites and serve close to 1 million patients every year."
Author: Jan Schakowsky

23. "The family which takes its mauve an cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, lighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. They pass on into countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. (The goods which the latter advertise have an absolute priority in our value system. Such aesthetic considerations as a view of the countryside accordingly come second. On such matters we are consistent.) They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius?"
Author: John Kenneth Galbraith

24. "So, is there hope for a truly democratic Africa? Long answer: Only if continent-wide improvements in education, human rights and public health are coupled with an aggressive and far-sighted debt-relief program that breaks the cycle of subsistence farming and urban squalor. Short answer: No."
Author: Jon Stewart

25. "Many of the received models of modern architecture and planning owe their ultimate origin to the building code and public health reform movements of the second half of the 19th century."
Author: Kenneth Frampton

26. "City governments ought to be abolished, if only as a public health measure."
Author: L. Neil Smith

27. "AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one."
Author: Larry Kramer

28. "The root cause of the looming energy problem - and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health - is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them."
Author: Lawrence M. Krauss

29. "Decades ago, women suffered through horrifying back-alley abortions. Or, they used dangerous methods when they had no other recourse. So when the Republican Party launched an all-out assault on women's health, pushing bills to limit access to vital services, we had to ask: Why is the GOP trying to send women back... to the back alley?"
Author: Lisa Edelstein

30. "Newborn screening is a public health intervention that involves a simple blood test used to identify many life-threatening genetic illnesses before any symptoms begin."
Author: Lucille Roybal Allard

31. "Mr. Speaker, our Nation must no longer be complacent about underage drinking and its alarming consequences. We must bring this national public health crisis out of the shadow and into the bright light of a national priority."
Author: Lucille Roybal Allard

32. "I've been a medical and public health professional as well as a mother. I became skilled at juggling a number of priorities and competing interests. Like many other female leaders, I've tried to serve as a role model for the young women at my organization who are trying to balance a high-level leadership position and a family."
Author: Margaret Hamburg

33. "Public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation - not just with climate change but with a host of health, environmental and societal threats. The implications for the planet are grim."
Author: Michael E. Mann

34. "One thing governors feel, Democrats and Republicans alike, is that we have a health care system that, if you're on Medicaid, you have unlimited access to health care, at unlimited levels, at no cost. No wonder it's running away."
Author: Mike Huckabee

35. "The rest of the question-and-answer period was pretty standard stuff, with a few hardballs thrown in just to keep things interesting. Where did the senator stand on the death penalty? Given that most corpses tended to get up and try to eat folks, he didn't see it as a productive pursuit. What was his opinion on public health care? Failure to keep people healthy enough to stay alive bordered on criminal negligence. Was he prepared to face the ongoing challenges of disaster preparedness? After the mass reanimations following the explosions in San Diego, he couldn't imagine any presidency surviving without improved disaster planning."
Author: Mira Grant

36. "It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy -- like a national oil company -- held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist."
Author: Naomi Klein

37. "Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially that a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty used to punish women for their failure to achieve and conform to it]and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth."
Author: Naomi Wolf

38. "The reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you've lost the ability to contain it."
Author: Nathan Wolfe

39. "Meat consumption is just as dangerous to public health as tobacco use... It's time we looked into holding the meat producers and fast-food outlets legally accountable."
Author: Neal Barnard

40. "I believe, unlike people that are totally free-market, laissez-faire fundamentalists, that there is an important role that the government can play - one, in providing public goods, whether it's education, health care, or other things, and two, supervising countercyclical policy - stimulus, whether it's monetary, fiscal, or otherwise."
Author: Nouriel Roubini

41. "But if you're asking my opinion, I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick."
Author: Paul Farmer

42. "The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems."
Author: Paul Farmer

43. "In honor of Surgeon General Koop's legacy, we should ensure that the position of surgeon general is protected from political interference, funded appropriately and nominated from the ranks of career public health professionals who merit consideration, as is done in the other uniformed services."
Author: Richard Carmona

44. "Americans are opting out of public venues like the playground and the sidewalk for private venues like the healthclub and the mall. We're living our lives inside one form of corporation or another."
Author: Robert D. Kaplan

45. "Since 1994, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have considered it politically risky to offer a plan to fix America's broken health care system. The American public, though, has paid the price for this silence as health care costs skyrocketed, millions went uninsured, and millions more grappled with financial insecurity and hardship."
Author: Ron Wyden

46. "I am extremely proud of my service with the government and my efforts to help safeguard public health and protect our country against the scourge of offensive biological warfare."
Author: Steven Hatfill

47. "Soaring prescription drug costs have placed a tremendous strain on family budgets. They have also imposed a heavy burden on employers - both public and private - who are struggling to provide affordable health insurance coverage to their workers."
Author: Susan Collins

48. "There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell."
Author: Terry Pratchett

49. "To say that some kind of god might exist is to vivify its being with mystery. To define a god into existence because it meets certain criteria for godhood is to kill that god by turning it into a cheapjack idol with a publicity team of theologians behind it. This would explain why so many deities—all of them, in fact—have fallen apart or are in the process of doing so: eventually every god loses its mystery because it has become overqualified for its job. After a god's mystery is gone, arguments for its reality begin. Logic steps in to resuscitate what has been bled of its healthful vagueness. Finally, another "living god" is consigned to the mortuary of scholars."
Author: Thomas Ligotti

50. "One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase "looking for life, destroying life," Then he explained, "It's an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies." I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world's errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the "erasing" of people, the "hiding away" of suffering. "My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember."
Author: Tracy Kidder

Public Health Quotes Pictures