Quotes from book
The Passing of the Great Race

The Passing of the Great Race
Madison Grant

The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History is a 1916 book by American eugenicist, lawyer, and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant. Though influential, the book was largely ignored when it first appeared; it went through several revisions and editions, but was never a best seller. Grant expounds a theory of Nordic superiority and argues for a strong eugenics program.

Madison Grant photo

“In the democratic forms of government the operation of universal suffrage tends toward the selection of the average man for public office rather than the man qualified by birth, education, and integrity. From a racial point of view, it will inevitably increase the preponderance of the lower types and cause a corresponding loss of efficiency in the community as a whole.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Madison Grant photo

“The name "Aryan race" must also be frankly discarded as a term of racial significance. It is today purely linguistic, although there was at one time, of course, an identity between the original Aryan mother tongue and the race that first spoke and developed it. In short there is not now, and there never was either a Caucasian or an Indo-European race, but there was once, thousands of years ago, an Aryan race now long since vanished into dim memories of the past.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 62.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Madison Grant photo

“The continuity of physical traits and the limitation of the effects of environment to the individual only are now so thoroughly recognized by scientists that it is at most a question of time when the social consequences which result from such crossings will be generally understood by the public at large. As soon as the true bearing and import of the facts are appreciated by lawmakers, a complete change in our political structure will inevitably occur, and our present reliance on the influences of education will be superseded by a readjustment based on racial values.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 262.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Madison Grant photo

“Race feeling may be called prejudice by those whose careers are cramped by it, but it is a natural antipathy which serves to maintain the purity of type. The unfortunate fact that nearly all species of men interbreed freely leaves us no choice in the matter. Either the races must be kept apart by artificial devices of this sort, or else they ultimately amalgamate, and in the offspring the more generalized or lower type prevails.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 193.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Madison Grant photo

“Where the environment is too soft and luxurious and no strife is required for survival, not only are weak strains and individuals allowed to survive and encouraged to breed but the strong types also grow fat mentally and physically.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 20.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Madison Grant photo

“One of its [the First World War’s] most certain results will be the partial destruction of the aristocratic classes everywhere in northern Europe … This will tend to realize the standardization of type so dear to democratic ideals. If equality cannot be obtained by lengthening and uplifting the stunted of body and of mind, it can be at least realized by the destruction of the exalted of stature and of soul.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 173.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Madison Grant photo

“The boast of the modern Indian that he is of the same race as his English ruler, is entirely without basis in fact, and the little dark native lives amid the monuments of a departed grandeur, professing the religion and speaking the tongue of his long forgotten Nordic conquerors, without the slightest claim to blood kinship.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 64.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Madison Grant photo

“This [the Mediterranean] is the race that gave the world the great civilizations of Egypt, of Crete, of Phoenicia including Carthage, of Etruria and of Mycenaean Greece. It gave us, when mixed and invigorated with Nordic elements, the most splendid of all civilizations, that of ancient Hellas, and the most enduring of political organizations, the Roman State.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 139.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Madison Grant photo

“Africa north of the Sahara, from a zoological point of view, is now, and has been since early Tertiary times, a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man. The Berbers of north Africa to-day are racially identical with the Spaniards and south Italians.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 152.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

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