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!

You can't be what you don't see. I didn't think about being a doctor. I didn't even think about being a clerk in a store, I'd never seen a black clerk in a clothing store.

Marijuana is beneficial to many patients

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.

We've tried ignorance for a thousand years. It's time we try education.

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.

I've pretty much always used my positions as a bully pulpit. What that means is strongly advocating for the things I feel are really important. Gun violence, to me, is the highest-priority public-health issue, and I have to make sure Congress is aware of it, the American people are aware of it, the president is aware of it, and that we all begin together to develop policies to exterminate the disease - the epidemic, really - of gun violence.