Margaret Sanger Quotes

65 Sourced Quotes

The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

Margaret Sanger
Woman must have her freedom; the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers; and before it can be his, it is hers alone.

Margaret Sanger
When motherhood becomes the fruit of deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.

Margaret Sanger
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
She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.

Margaret Sanger
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
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
It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide.

Margaret Sanger
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
I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther.

Margaret Sanger
I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

Margaret Sanger
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
The menace of another pregnancy hung like a sword over the head of every poor woman...

Margaret Sanger
Like begets like. We gather perfect fruit from perfect trees.... Abused soil brings forth stunted growths.

Margaret Sanger
Very early in my childhood I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jail with large families.

Margaret Sanger
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
... thousands of little children occupy sleeping quarters with parents and boarders whose every act is visible to all. Morality indeed! Society is much like the ostrich with its head in the sand. It will not look at facts and face the responsibility of its own stupidity.

Margaret Sanger
Eugenics aims to arouse the enthusiasm or the interest of the people in the welfare of the world fifteen or twenty generations in the future. On its negative side it shows us that 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 states is being diverted from the development and the progress of human expression and civilization.

Margaret Sanger
The truth was out. It illuminated the world. Motherhood no longer cringed before the relentless laws of fecundity.

Margaret Sanger
... we explained simply what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way — no matter how early it was performed it was taking a life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way — it took a little time, a little trouble, but was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun.

Margaret Sanger
Woman was and is condemned to a system under which the lawful rapes exceed the unlawful ones a million to one.

Margaret Sanger
No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.

Margaret Sanger
In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the idea of 'fit' and 'unfit.' Who is to decide this question? The grosser, the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the writings of the representative Eugenists one cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails.

Margaret Sanger
No woman can call herself free who cannot choose the time to be a mother or not as she sees fit.

Margaret Sanger
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
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
As an advocate of birth control I wish … to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation.... On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

Margaret Sanger
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
Birth control is the means by which woman attains basic freedom.

Margaret Sanger
Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.

Margaret Sanger