Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term “birth control”, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. These Margaret Sanger quotes will motivate you.
Best Margaret Sanger Quotes
- “Covertly invest into non-White areas, invest in ghetto abortion clinics. Help to raise
money for free abortions, in primarily non-White areas. Perhaps abortion
clinic syndicates throughout North America, that primarily operate in
non-White areas and receive tax support, should be promoted.” ~ Margaret Sanger - “The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. 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
- “The masses of Negroes…particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” ~ Margaret Sanger
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“Blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “Birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Christianity no less than Capitalism.” ~ Margaret Sanger
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“Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native-born Americans.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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
- “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
- “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan.” ~ Margaret Sanger
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“Couples should be required to submit applications to have a child.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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
- “By all means, there should be no children when either mother or father suffers from such diseases as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, cancer, epilepsy, insanity, drunkenness, and mental disorders. In the case of the mother, heart disease, kidney trouble, and pelvic deformities are also a serious bar to childbearing No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “Birth control is nothing more or less than…weeding out the unfit.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “It now remains for the United States government to set a sensible example to the
world by offering a bonus or a yearly pension to all obviously unfit parents who allow
themselves to be sterilized by harmless and scientific means.” ~ Margaret Sanger -
“No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief aim of birth control.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.” ~ Margaret Sanger
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“I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “Hordes of people [are] born, who live, yet who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race one iota. Their lives are hopeless repetitions… Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world; we must cultivate our garden.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “Very early in my childhood, I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jail with large families.” ~ Margaret Sanger quotes
- “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world that have disease from their parents, that have no chance to be a human being, practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin – that people can – can commit.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.” ~ Margaret Sanger
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“Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “Birth Control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science. . . as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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
- “She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.” ~ Margaret Sanger quotes
- “The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.” ~ Margaret Sanger
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“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.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “The first right of every child is to be wanted, to be desired, to be planned for with an intensity of love that gives it its title to being.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers – and before it can be his, it is hers alone.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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
- “Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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.” ~ Margaret Sanger
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“No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child without a permit for parenthood.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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
- “Woman must not accept; she must challenge.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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 [sic], one cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . .” ~ Margaret Sanger
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“Give dysgenic groups [people with ‘bad genes’] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “Every single case of an inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . . Memories of mother drying my tears, reading aloud, cutting cookies and singing as she did, listening to prayers I said as I knelt with my forehead pressed against her knee, tucking me in bed and turning down the light. They have carried me through the years and given my life such a firm foundation that it does not rock beneath flood or tempest.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “If we are really to live at all we must put our convictions into action.” ~ Margaret Sanger
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“The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for critical and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates … that uncontrolled fertility is universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the transmission of hereditable traits.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “To give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.
g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.” ~ Margaret Sanger -
“Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying . . . demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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
- “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.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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
- “Some lives drift here and there like reeds in a stream, depending on changing currents for their activity. Others are like swimmers knowing the depth of the water. Each stroke helps them onward to a definite objective.” ~ Margaret Sanger
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“The real hope of the world lies in putting as painstaking thought into the business of mating as we do into other big businesses.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “There is only one reply to a request for a higher birthrate among the intelligent, and that is to ask the government to first take the burden of the insane and feeble-minded from your back. [Mandatory] sterilization for these is the answer.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to an earthly paradise.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “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
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“The procreation of [the diseased, the feeble-minded and paupers] should be stopped.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “The most serious charge that can be brought against modern benevolence is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents, and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.” ~ Margaret Sanger
