Margaret Sanger - The Pivot of Civilization (1922)

14 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes.

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
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
Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the "failure" of philanthropy, but rather at its success.

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 emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive periodwe prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.

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

Margaret Sanger