“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 , book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 18, "The Goal"

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Margaret Sanger 61

American birth control activist, educator and nurse 1879–1966

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“In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. … The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. … The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Machine to End War (1937)

“Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.”

Barbara Kingsolver (1955) American author, poet and essayist

Source: Homeland and Other Stories

“May God help us to prepare a dwelling place for this noble birth, so that we may all attain spiritual motherhood”

Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) German theologian

Quoted in "Johannes Tauler: Sermons" translated by Maria May God help us to prepare a dwelling place for this noble birth, so that we may all attain spiritual motherhood Shardy

“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 (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

"Apostle of Birth Control Sees Cause Gaining Here", The New York Times, , p. XII http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C01E1DF1F30E333A2575BC0A9629C946295D6CF.

“We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men, and if we were free and developed, healthy in body and mind, as we should be under natural conditions, our motherhood would be our glory. That function gives women such wisdom and power as no male can possess.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

Diary of 27 December 1890. Published in Elizabeth Cady Stanton as revealed in her letters, diary and reminiscences http://books.google.com/books?id=CIsEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA270&dq=%22We+are,+as+a+sex,+infinitely+superior+to+men.%22+--&client=firefox-a#v=onepage&q=%22We%20are%2C%20as%20a%20sex%2C%20infinitely%20superior%20to%20men.%22%20--&f=false By Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot Stanton Blatch. Harper & brothers, 1922. p 270. GoogleBooks URL accessed 18 September 2009.

“Should there not be manifest progress and development but in a higher sense than people have imagined it? … No one is in his age alone, he builds on the preceding one, this becomes nothing but the foundation of the future, wants to be nothing but that — this is what we are told by the analogy in nature, God’s speaking exemplary model in all works! Manifestly so in the human species!”

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic

"This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity" ["Auch eine Philosophie zur Geschichte der Menscheit"] (1774), as translated by Michael N. Forster, in Johann Gottlieb von Herder: Philosophical Writings (2002), edited by Michael N. Forster, p. 299

“More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue in birth control.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Editors of American Medicine in a review of Sanger's article "Why Not Birth Control Clinics in America?" published in Birth Control Review, May 1919
Misattributed

“The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.”

William Golding (1911–1993) British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

Responses in a publicity questionnaire on Lord of the Flies from the American publishers, as quoted in Who Rules?: Introduction to the Study of Politics (1971) by Dick W. Simpson, p. 16
Context: The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable. The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island. The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?

“I understood three manners of beholding of Motherhood in God: the first is grounded in our Nature’s making; the second is taking of our nature, — and there beginneth the Motherhood of Grace; the third is Motherhood of working, — and therein is a forthspreading by the same Grace, of length and breadth and height and of deepness without end. And all is one Love.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 59

“Care for the race, even if the individual must suffer — this must be the keynote of our future. This was the guiding principle which underlay all the discussions of the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921. Not quantity but quality must be the aim in the development of each nation, to make men fit to maintain their places in the struggle for existence. We must be concerned above all with racial values; every race must seek out and develop and improve its own racial characteristics. Racial consciousness is not pride of race, but proper respect for the Purity of race is today found in but one nation — the Scandinavian.”

Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) American geologist, paleontologist, and eugenist

As quoted in "The World's Work: A History of Our Time" (1924) by Walter Hines Page and Arthur Wilson Page, p. 253; also in "Man Rises to Parnassus" (1928), p. 220

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