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“These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have to-day 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

The Pivot of Civilization, 1922

Idea

“Margaret Sanger: Oh, John you do ask hard questions. I should think, that instead of being impractical, it is really very practical and intelligent and humane.”

Margaret Sanger

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

Intelligence , Question , Thinking

“Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing. […] Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand. 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

Source: Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938), Chapter 29, "While the Doctors Consult", p. 366.

Women , Children , Understanding , Sea

“It seems to me from my experience where I have been in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubts. They do not do this with the white people and if we can train the Negro doctor at the Clinic he can go among them with enthusiasm and with knowledge, which, I believe, will have far-reaching results among the colored people. His work in my opinion should be entirely with the Negro profession and the nurses, hospital, social workers, as well as the County’s white doctors. His success will depend upon his personality and his training by us.”

Margaret Sanger
People , Color , Knowledge , Success

“John Parsons: Don’t you think such a theory, such a radical theory, is anti-social?”

Margaret Sanger

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

Thinking

“The ministers work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. 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

Commenting on the 'Negro Project' in a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, December 10, 1939. http://smithlibraries.org/digital/items/show/495 - Sanger manuscripts, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon's Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.
(Note: There is a different date circulated, e.g. Oct. 19, 1939; but Dec. 10 is the correct date of Mrs. Sanger's letter to Mr. Gamble.)

Hope , Idea , Training

“…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

Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938)

Life , Way , Time

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Margaret Sanger

Misquoted by Diane S. Dew http://www.dianedew.com/sanger.htm (2001)
Omits words from a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble Sanger proposing the "Negro Project", where Sanger wrote: "And <span style="color:darkgray">we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,</span> and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea <span style="color:darkgray">if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.</span>"
The quote was similarly misused in "Women, Race, & Class" (12 February 1983) by Angela Davis, where it is implied that that Sanger was organizing an extermination campaign and the minister would be the main propaganda milling machine.
Misattributed

“Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need … We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.”

Margaret Sanger

Misquoting Ernst Rudin, "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need", Birth Control Review, April 1933. http://lifedynamics.com/app/uploads/2015/09/1933-04-April.pdf
Actual quote by Rudin: "Not only is it our task to prevent the multiplication of bad stocks, it is also to preserve the well-endowed stocks and to increase the birth-rate of the sound average population."
Misattributed

“Our 'overhead' expense in segregating the delinquent, the defective and the dependent, in prisons, asylums and permanent homes, our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying … demonstrate our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism. No industrial corporation could maintain its existence upon such a foundation. Yet hardheaded 'captains of industry,' financiers who pride themselves upon their cool-headed and keen-sighted business ability are dropping millions into rosewater philanthropies and charities that are silly at best and vicious at worst. In our dealings with such elements there is a bland maladministration and misuse of huge sums that should in all righteousness be used for the development and education of the healthy elements of the community.”

Margaret Sanger

Source: The Pivot of Civilization, 1922, Chapter 12, "Woman and the Future"

Education , Home , Communication , Failure

“The third group [of society] are those irresponsible and reckless ones having little regard for the consequences of their acts, or whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers. Many of this group are diseased, feeble-minded, and are of the pauper element dependent upon the normal and fit members of society for their support. There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped.”

Margaret Sanger

Speech quoted in "Birth Control: What It Is, How It Works, What It Will Do." The Proceedings of the First American Birth Control Conference. Held at the Hotel Plaza, New York City, November 11-12, 1921. Published by the Birth Control Review, Gothic Press, pages 172 and 174.

People , Disease , Exercises , Support

“If plants, and live stock as well, require space and air, sunlight and love, children need them even more. The only real wealth of our country lies in the men and women of the next generation. A farmer would rather produce a thousand thoroughbreds than a million runts. How are we to breed a race of human thoroughbreds unless we follow the same plan? We must make this country into a garden of children instead of a disorderly back lot overrun with human weeds. In a home where there are too many children in proportion to the living space, the air and sunlight, the children are usually overcrowded and underfed. They are a constant burden on their mother's overtaxed strength and the father's earning capacity. Such homes cannot be gardens in any sense of the word.”

Margaret Sanger

Radio WFAB Syracuse, , transcripted in "The Meaning of Radio Birth Control", April 1924, p. 111
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

Love , Women , Men , Children

“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

(Handbill advertising Sanger's first clinic, Brooklyn, New York, October 1916) https://sangerpapers.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/sanger_flyer.jpg
published in "Birthright: What's next for Planned Parenthood." Jill Lepore. The New Yorker, Nov. 14 2011 - page 48.

Life , Children , Family , Training

“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 book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 8, "Birth Control; A Parents' Problem or Woman's?"

World , Freedom , Daughters

“You caused this. Mother is dead from having too many children.”

Margaret Sanger

To her father at her mother's funeral.
Quoted in [2010-05-09, The Pill turns 50, Nidhi Bhushan, DNA, http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report_the-pill-turns-50_1380774]

Children , Dead

“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

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

Birth , Knowledge

“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

The Pivot of Civilization, 1922

Spring , Failure , Evil , Success

“Margaret Sanger: Well I suppose a subject like that is really so personal that it is entirely up to the parents to decide, but from my view, I believe there should be no more babies in starving countries for the next ten years.”

Margaret Sanger

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BG11OHrCDk http://www.britishpathe.com/video/one-minute-news-8/query/margaret+slee
Ban on Babies is All Wet, Cry Angry Britons, Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1947, p. 9. https://www.google.com/search?q=MS+to+Robert+C.+Nowe%2C+Aug.+22%2C+1947&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=%22Ban+on+Babies+is+All+Wet%22
Granny Sanger' Drops a Bomb - A Ten Year Moratorium on Births, Margaret Sanger Papers, Newsletter #65 (Fall 2013) http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/articles/grannysanger.php
One Minute News (1947), interview with British Pathé's John Parsons

Parent , Baby , Personality , Country

“[Charity] conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. For it is never the intention of such philanthropy to give the poor over-burdened and often undernourished mother of the slum the opportunity to make the choice herself, to decide whether she wishes time after time to bring children into the world. It merely says 'Increase and multiply: We are prepared to help you do this.' Whereas the great majority of mothers realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth. … Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”

Margaret Sanger

Source: The Pivot of Civilization, 1922, Chapter 5, "The Cruelty of Charity"

Women , Children , Stupidity , World

“Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live twelve months. This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a year die before they reach the age of five. Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members.”

Margaret Sanger book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 5, "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families."

Family , Chance , Children , Health