What I can do is to go out and talk about the problems and solutions, make people aware of the scope of the problems, get them to become advocates for a turnaround, and convince them to develop an action plan, targeted to their community, to deal with young people. [They need to] find out what the kids want to do - dances, midnight-basketball leagues.

As long as I was in Washington I never met anybody that I thought was good enough, who knew enough, or who loved enough to make sexual decisions for anybody else.

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

If you can't control your reproduction, you can't control your life.

Given a choice between hearing my daughter say "I'm pregnant" or "I used a condom", most mothers would get up in the middle of the night and buy them herself.

Guns kill more teenagers than the other big killers - heart disease, cancer, and AIDS - combined.

[We must] deal with all of the contributing factors to gun violence as a whole, because it's like a leaky bucket - if you've got a bucket with six holes shot through it, [and] you plug up five, you've still got a leaky bucket.