Margaret Sanger Quotes

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

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

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

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

Margaret Sanger
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
Has knowledge of birth control, so carefully guarded and so secretly practiced by the women of the wealthy class – and so tenaciously withheld from the working women – brought them misery? Rather, has it not promoted greater happiness, greater freedom, greater prosperity and more harmony among them? The women who have this knowledge are the women who have been free to develop, free to enjoy in its best sense, and free to advance the interests of the community.

Margaret Sanger
But during all the long years this matter has been discussed, advocated, refuted, the people themselves—poor people especially—were blindly, desperately practicing family limitation, just as they are practicing it today. To them birth control does not mean what it does to us. To them it has meant the most barbaric methods. It has meant the killing of babies—infanticide,—abortions,—in one crude way or another.

Margaret Sanger
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. So, in compliance with nature's working plan, we must permit womanhood its full development before we can expect of it efficient motherhood. If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman.

Margaret Sanger
You caused this. Mother is dead from having too many children.

Margaret Sanger
All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class, and if morality is to mean anything at all to us, we must regard all the changes which tend toward the uplift and survival of the human race as moral.

Margaret Sanger
Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks— those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.

Margaret Sanger
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
I care nothing for Free Speech in and by itself. All of us place too much value on the power of the printed word and the power of the spoken word. We read too much. We listen too much. We live too little. We act too little.... I speak to you by my actions past and present. I have been gagged, I have been been suppressed, I have have been hauled off to jail. Yet every time, more people ave listened to me, more have protested, more have lifted their voices, more have been responded with courage and bravery.... As a propagandist I see immense advantaged in being gagged. It silences me, but it makes millions of others talk about me, and the cause in which I live.

Margaret Sanger
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
Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying... demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism,

Margaret Sanger
MOTHERS! / Can you afford to have a large family? / Do you want any more children? / If not, why do you have them? / DO NOT KILL, / DO NOT TAKE LIFE / BUT PREVENT / Safe, Harmless Information can be obtained of trained nurses at / 46 AMBOY STREET.

Margaret Sanger
Never be ashamed of passion. If you are strongly sexed, you are richly endowed.

Margaret Sanger
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
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
The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.

Margaret Sanger
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
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
These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste, of inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice.

Margaret Sanger
Birth Control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science... as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.

Margaret Sanger
As a cause becomes more and more successful, the ideas of the people engaged in it are bound to change.

Margaret Sanger
Our laws force women into celibacy on the one hand, or abortion on the other. [npg] Both conditions are declared by eminent medical authorities to be injurious to health.

Margaret Sanger
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
Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.

Margaret Sanger
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