Margaret Sanger: Trending quotes

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Margaret Sanger: 122 quotes2 likes

“(We) are seeking to assist the white race toward the elimination of the unfit”

Margaret Sanger

blacks <br class="br">Falsely attributed to "Birth Control and Racial Betterment", Birth Control Review, February 1919 http://lifedynamics.com/app/uploads/2015/09/1919-02-February.pdf, by Steve Deace, " Planned Parenthood: The next relic from our racist past that must be purged http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/13/steve-deace-planned-parenthood-the-next-relic-from/", Midwest Conservative (The Washington Times), <br class="br">Actual quote: "Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenicists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit." <br class="br">Misattributed

“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

Ford Hall Forum Boston Speech, Woman Rebel, The Margaret Sanger Story, Peter Bagge.

“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

Birth Control Review, December 1920
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

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

Margaret Sanger

"The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda", October 1921, page 5.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

“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 Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda", October 1921, page 5.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

“The marriage-bed is the most degenerating influence of the social order.”

Margaret Sanger

Alice Groff, "The Marriage Bed", The Woman Rebel, V.I No. 5, p. 39 (edited by Margaret Sanger)
Misattributed

“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

Source: The Pivot of Civilization, 1922, Chapter 8, "Dangers of Cradle Competition"

“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 book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 10, "Contraceptives or Abortion?"

“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

"Morality and Birth Control", February-March, 1918, pp. 11,14.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

“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

"Morality and Birth Control", February-March, 1918, pp. 11,14.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

“The church has ever opposed the progress of woman on the ground that her freedom would lead to immorality. We ask the church to have more confidence in women. We ask the opponents of this movement to reverse the methods of the church, which aims to keep women moral by keeping them in fear and in ignorance, and to inculcate into them a higher and truer morality based upon knowledge. And ours is the morality of knowledge. If we cannot trust woman with the knowledge of her own body, then I claim that two thousand years of Christian teaching has proved to be a failure.”

Margaret Sanger

The Morality of Birth Control, 18 November 1921, Park Theatre, NY http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/margaretsangermoralityofbirthcontrol.htm

“The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.”

Margaret Sanger

W.E.B. DuBois, Birth Control Review, June 1932. Quoted by Sanger in her proposal for the "Negro Project."
Misattributed

“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 book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 2, "Women's Struggle for Freedom"

“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

"Morality and Birth Control", February-March, 1918, pp. 11,14.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

“John Parsons: What about the women who want babies now and in 10 years won’t be able to have babies? Rather impractical don’t you think?”

Margaret Sanger

One Minute News (1947), interview with British Pathé's John Parsons

“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

"Morality and Birth Control", February-March, 1918, pp. 11,14.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

“John Parsons: But Mrs. Slee in this country having babies is the only thing left which is both unrationed and untaxed, do you think we really ought to stop?”

Margaret Sanger

One Minute News (1947), interview with British Pathé's John Parsons

“Blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race.”

Margaret Sanger

Unknown source. Often falsely cited as Birth Control Review, April 1933 http://lifedynamics.com/app/uploads/2015/09/1933-04-April.pdf, as in William D. Gairdner, The War Against the Family (1992), p. 464 https://books.google.com/books?id=vZsQ5d_43zEC&pg=PA464. No letters or articles by Sanger appear in that issue. <br class="br">John George, in American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists & Others (1992), p. 415, describes this quote as "evidently concocted in the late 1980s". <br class="br">Misattributed

“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

Source: Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938), Chapter 30, "Now Is the Time for Converse", p. 374.

“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

Source: The Pivot of Civilization, 1922, Chapter 8, "Dangers of Cradle Competition" (also quoted in Charles Valenza, "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" Family Planning Perspectives, January-February 1985, page 44.)