Koop's Quotes

#1. 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.

Richard Carmona

#2. A grateful world, nation and cadre of surgeons general who followed in his shadow are forever indebted to Surgeon General Koop's wisdom, fortitude, integrity and selfless service.

Richard Carmona

#3. 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.

C. Everett Koop

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

C. Everett Koop

#5. I have a voracious appetite for images I can translate.

Wanda Koop

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

C. Everett Koop

#7. By the year 2025, 500 million people will die of smoking. Now, that's a Vietnam War every day for 27 years. That's the Titanic sinking every 27 minutes for 27 years.

C. Everett Koop

#8. It can be frightening to spend 5 weeks alone in a cabin in the wilderness. I was able to collect my thoughts and worked a lot - because I couldn't do anything else.

Wanda Koop

#9. A thousand people will stop smoking today. Their funerals will be held sometime in the next three or four days.

C. Everett Koop

#10. I paint bridges because they're in transition; you're coming or going, you're not anywhere - full of possibility.

Wanda Koop

#11. 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.

C. Everett Koop

#12. 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.

C. Everett Koop

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

C. Everett Koop

#14. Drugs don't work in patients who don't take them.

C. Everett Koop

#15. Polls that have been taken by kindergarten, first- and second-grade teachers indicate that 30 percent of the kids have been deprived in some way so that they are physically unable to keep up with the class.

C. Everett Koop

#16. Dr. Lourie's determined and compassionate advocacy led to new and improved services for thousands of children and families across the nation ... the Lourie Center has rededicated itself institutionally to continuing his important work.

C. Everett Koop

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

C. Everett Koop

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

C. Everett Koop

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

C. Everett Koop

#20. You might expect that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists would be there and they are.

C. Everett Koop

#21. 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.

C. Everett Koop

#22. When I start doing a body of work I feel vulnerable, fearful. If I stopped trusting the process, I would stop doing art.

Wanda Koop

#23. 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.

C. Everett Koop

#24. Risks I think are the thing that make life important and everything that you and I do is risk vs. benefit. Is there a risk to sending your kid out? Absolutely. Is there a benefit? It exceeds the risk.

C. Everett Koop

#25. 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.

C. Everett Koop

#26. There are many stressed single parents who may be working two jobs in order to keep the family together.

C. Everett Koop

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

C. Everett Koop

#28. For the surface, I'm not interested in painterly convention. It's more interesting if it looks like it painted itself.

Wanda Koop

#29. I'm very interested in how colour and shape are perceived.

Wanda Koop

#30. 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.

C. Everett Koop

#31. I might be better able to help parents of dying children, but for quite a while I felt less able, too emotionally involved. And from that time on, I could rarely discuss the death of a child without tears welling up into my eyes.

C. Everett Koop

#32. I wish I felt energetic and could paint all the time, because there are so many paintings I'd like to do.

Wanda Koop

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

C. Everett Koop

#34. There's an assumption that because I'm an artist, I've got all the time in the world.

Wanda Koop

#35. Make your kids go out and play. Kids ought to grow up the way you and I grew up and we grew up fifty years apart or maybe more. But we did the same things. Now who's out playing in the afternoon? Nobody.

C. Everett Koop

#36. 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.

C. Everett Koop

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

C. Everett Koop

#38. 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

C. Everett Koop

#39. 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.

C. Everett Koop

#40. The light in the North is constantly a thrill for me ...

Wanda Koop

#41. The best prescription is knowledge.

C. Everett Koop

#42. They have been deprived nutritionally, or some illness has not been picked up, or they have not been screened for vision or hearing defects, or they have not had some kind of a chronic illness or error of metabolism picked up.

C. Everett Koop

#43. As a painter, taking photos is a form of shorthand - note-taking.

Wanda Koop

#44. 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.

C. Everett Koop

#45. 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.

C. Everett Koop

#46. 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.

C. Everett Koop

#47. Going on the ship felt like 100 years or one day. Timeless. Beautiful vertigo. It will continue to show up in my work.

Wanda Koop