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My job as a physician is to make sure I have provided my patients with the best options to make the decisions that affect their lives.

What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?

Medicine really matured me as a person because, as a physician, you're obviously dealing with life and death issues, issues much more serious than what we're talking about in entertainment. You can't get more serious than life and death. And if you can handle that, you can handle anything.

By training and keeping doctors in underserved areas, we're working toward a goal of increasing access to quality health care for more of our communities.

Value in medicine depends on information - as I said in 'Let Patients Help,' 'People perform better when they're informed better.' It follows that to make patients and families more effective in care, they need to know more.

One of my grandfathers, actually, having gone out there as a minister, decided he would better serve the people as a doctor. So at a very late age - at the age of 38 in fact - he changed course and decided to become a doctor.

I wish medical schools helped us to analyze our healthy and unhealthy reasons for becoming doctors.

As 17th U.S. Surgeon General, I was privileged to serve as the nation's doctor. I focused much of my time on promoting proven programs and individual steps that lead to good health.

Nature can do more than physicians.

At the end of the day, the more quality individuals you develop in the community, the better off the community should be.