Top 89 Quotes About Margaret Sanger
#1. Margaret Sanger didn't just introduce the idea of birth control into our culture at large, she freed women from indenture to their bodies.
Roxane Gay
#2. The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger
#3. Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.
Jill Lepore
#4. The contemporary Planned Parenthood movement was started by a woman named Margaret Sanger, who defended abortion rights on the basis of eugenics, the search for "good genes" based on the racist and evolutionary notions of "social Darwinism" prevalent in her day.
Russell D. Moore
#5. Opponents of legal birth control, including abortion, have tried for decades to play the race card, saying that legal abortion is racist. What they ignore is that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood in 1966.
Karen DeCrow
#6. Placing Margaret Sanger on the $20 bill will remind us of what she has done for women and our reproductive health and how the fight for reproductive freedom is an ongoing one.
Roxane Gay
#7. As we celebrate the 100th birthday of Margaret Sanger, our outrageous and our courageous leader, we will probably find a number of areas in which we may find more about Margaret Sanger than we thought we wanted to know ...
Faye Wattleton
#8. Birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tryanny of Christianity no less than Capitalism.
Margaret Sanger
#9. I cannot refrain from saying that women must come to recognize there is some function of womanhood other than being a child-bearing machine.
Margaret Sanger
#10. When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.
Margaret Sanger
#11. Some lives drift here and there like reeds in a stream, depending on changing currents for their activity. Others are like swimmers knowing the depth of the water. Each stroke helps them onward to a definite objective.
Margaret Sanger
#12. The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.
Margaret Sanger
#13. It is a noteworthy fact that not one of the women to whom I have spoken so far believes in abortion as a practice; but it is principle for which they are standing. They also believe that the complete abolition of the abortion law will shortly do away with abortions, as nothing else will.
Margaret Sanger
#14. The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.
Margaret Sanger
#15. In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when
we were finally through it was too late to return to New York.
Margaret Sanger
#16. The first right of every child is to be wanted, to be desired, to be planned for with an intensity of love that gives it its title to being.
Margaret Sanger
#17. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.
Margaret Sanger
#18. Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native born Americans.
Margaret Sanger
#19. Women must have economic and social equality with men.
Margaret Sanger
#20. She made people accept that women had the right to control their own destinies.
Margaret Sanger
#21. I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world.
Margaret Sanger
#22. Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.
Margaret Sanger
#23. The most serious charge that can be brought against modern benevolence is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.
Margaret Sanger
#24. The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order,
Margaret Sanger
#26. Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.
Margaret Sanger
#27. There is only one reply to a request for a higher birthrate among the intelligent, and that is to ask the government to first take the burden of the insane and feeble-minded from your back. [Mandatory] sterilization for these is the answer.
Margaret Sanger
#28. Eugenics, which had started long before my time, had once been defined as including free love and prevention of conception ... Recently it had cropped up again in the form of selective breeding.
Margaret Sanger
#29. The ocean could not be swept back with a broom. The truth was out. It illuminated the world. Motherhood no longer cringed before the relentless laws of fecundity.
Margaret Sanger
#30. Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods.
Margaret Sanger
#31. A woman's duty: To look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes ... to speak and act in defiance of convention.
Margaret Sanger
#33. Couples should be required to submit applications to have a child ...
Margaret Sanger
#34. The masses of Negroes ... particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disasterously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit ...
Margaret Sanger
#35. Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.
Margaret Sanger
#36. Give dysgenic groups [people with 'bad genes'] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.
Margaret Sanger
#37. It now remains for the United States government to set a sensible example to the
world by offering a bonus or a yearly pension to all obviously unfit parents who allow
themselves to be sterilized by harmless and scientific means.
Margaret Sanger
#38. We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for critical and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates ... that uncontrolled fertility is universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the transmission of hereditable traits.
Margaret Sanger
#39. [N]o one can doubt that there are times when an abortion is justifiable but they will become unnecessary when care is taken to prevent conception. This is the only cure for abortions.
Margaret Sanger
#40. Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.
Margaret Sanger
#41. Woman was and is condemned to a system under which the lawful rapes exceed the unlawful ones a million to one.
Margaret Sanger
#42. Usually this desire [for family limitation] has been laid to economic pressure It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It
has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child abandonment and abortion.
Margaret Sanger
#43. Never be ashamed of passion. If you are strongly sexed, you are richly endowed.
Margaret Sanger
#44. Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
Margaret Sanger
#45. Eugenics is the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.
Margaret Sanger
#46. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.
Margaret Sanger
#47. It has always been the depth of my belief, my faith, or my love that was the mainspring of my behavior. When once I believed in doing a thing, nothing could prevent my doing it.
Margaret Sanger
#48. Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to earthly paradise.
Margaret Sanger
#49. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child without a permit for parenthood.
Margaret Sanger
#50. Birth control is nothing more or less than ... weeding out the unfit.
Margaret Sanger
#52. It is ... marvellous ... to have a period of apparent fanaticism. No obstacle can discourage you. The single vision of your quest obscures defeat and lifts you over mountainous difficulties.
Margaret Sanger
#53. Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man's equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.
Margaret Sanger
#54. Like begets like. We gather perfect fruit from perfect trees ... Abused soil brings forth stunted growths.
Margaret Sanger
#55. As I look back upon my life, I see that every part of it was a preparation for the next. The most trivial of incidents fits into the larger pattern like a mosaic in a preconceived design.
Margaret Sanger
#56. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is throgh a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the Minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.
Margaret Sanger
#57. Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.
Margaret Sanger
#59. As often as I have witnessed the miracle [birth], held the perfect creature with its tiny hands and feet, each time I have felt as though I were entering a cathedral with prayer in my heart.
Margaret Sanger
#60. The most far-reaching social development of modern times is the revolt of woman against sex servitude. The most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood ...
Margaret Sanger
#61. Very early in my childhood I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jail with large families.
Margaret Sanger
#62. If we are really to live at all we must put our convictions into action.
Margaret Sanger
#63. Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.
Margaret Sanger
#64. Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need ... We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.
Margaret Sanger
#65. No woman can call herself free who cannot choose the time to be a mother or not as she sees fit.
Margaret Sanger
#66. The greatest issue is to raise the question of birth control out of the gutter of obscenity ... into the light of intelligence and human understanding.
Margaret Sanger
#67. While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization,
Margaret Sanger
#68. As a cause becomes more and more successful, the ideas of the people engaged in it are bound to change ...
Margaret Sanger
#69. No despot ever flung forth his legions to die in foreign conquest, no privilege-ruled nation ever erupted across its borders, to lock in death embrace with another, but behind them loomed the driving power of a population too large for its boundaries and its natural resources.
Margaret Sanger
#71. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members. [Explaining rationale for using prominent black leaders to advocate birth control and abortion]
Margaret Sanger
#72. We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all-that the wealth of individuals and of state is being diverted from the development and the progress of human expression and civilization.
Margaret Sanger
#73. More children from the fit, less from the unfit
that is the chief aim of birth control.
Margaret Sanger
#74. The real hope of the world lies in putting as painstaking thought into the business of mating as we do into other big businesses.
Margaret Sanger
#75. War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.
Margaret Sanger
#76. No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.
Margaret Sanger
#79. Progeny. We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.
Margaret Sanger
#80. I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther.
Margaret Sanger
#81. Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying ... demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism,
Margaret Sanger
#82. Life has taught me one supreme lesson. This is that we must - if we are really to live at all, if we are to enjoy the life more abundant promised by the Sages of Wisdom - we must put our convictions into action. My remuneration has been that I have been privileged to act out my faith.
Margaret Sanger
#83. The procreation of [the diseased, the feeble-minded and paupers] should be stopped.
Margaret Sanger
#84. Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.
Margaret Sanger
#85. Many people are horrified at the idea of birth control ... It is simply the keynote of a new moral program.
Margaret Sanger
#86. To give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.
g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.
Margaret Sanger
#87. I was married to Margaret Joan Howe in 1940. Although not a scientist herself she has contributed more to my work than anyone else by providing a peaceful and happy home.
Frederick Sanger
#88. Birth control is the means by which woman attains basic freedom ...
Margaret Sanger
#89. No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.
Margaret Sanger
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