Margaret Sanger Quotes

On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

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.

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.

Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.

Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.

No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.

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

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

Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.

I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

As I look back upon my life, I see that every part of it was a preparation for the next. The most trivial of incidents fits into the larger pattern like a mosaic in a preconceived design.

Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native born Americans.

The submission of her body without love or desire is degrading to the woman's finer sensibility, all the marriage certificates on earth to the contrary notwithstanding.

More children from the fit, less from the unfit -- that is the chief aim of birth control.

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts.

Birth control is nothing more or less than...weeding out the unfit.

Give dysgenic groups [people with 'bad genes'] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.

It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide.

A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.

When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.

The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.

Woman must not accept; she must challenge.

No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child without a permit for parenthood.

The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.

I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther.

The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.

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

Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying . . . demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism.

No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.

Couples should be required to submit applications to have a child.

... the ocean could not be swept back with a broom. The truth was out. It illuminated the world. Motherhood no longer cringed before the relentless laws of fecundity.

As often as I have witnessed the miracle [birth], held the perfect creature with its tiny hands and feet, each time I have felt as though I were entering a cathedral with prayer in my heart.

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.

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.

It is ... marvellous ... to have a period of apparent fanaticism. No obstacle can discourage you. The single vision of your quest obscures defeat and lifts you over mountainous difficulties.

Enthusiasm is a divine possession.

If we are really to live at all we must put our convictions into action.

No one can doubt that there are times when an abortion is justifiable but they will become unnecessary when care is taken to prevent conception. This is the only cure for abortions.

Organized charity itself is. . . the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents

The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order.

The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom.

Speaking of Margaret Sanger, Grandson Alexander Sanger, head of Planned Parenthood of New York City, said: She made people accept that women had the right to control their own destinies.

Woman was and is condemned to a system under which the lawful rapes exceed the unlawful ones a million to one.

The real hope of the world lies in putting as painstaking thought into the business of mating as we do into other big businesses.

The greatest issue is to raise the question of birth control out of the gutter of obscenity ... into the light of intelligence and human understanding.

I cannot refrain from saying that women must come to recognize there is some function of womanhood other than being a child-bearing machine.

We gather perfect fruit from perfect trees.

Women must have economic and social equality with men.

A woman’s duty: To look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes… to speak and act in defiance of convention.

No woman can call herself free who cannot choose the time to be a mother or not as she sees fit.