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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

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Margaret Sanger
Age: 86 †
Born: 1879
Born: September 14
Died: 1966
Died: September 6
Activist
Feminist
Film Director
Nurse
Sex Columnist
Trade Unionist
Corning
New York
Margaret Higgins
Margaret Higgins Sanger
Margaret Hennessy Higgins
Doe
Independent
Body
Choose
Control
Call
Whether
Free
Sterilization
Woman
Contraception
Mother
Consciously

More quotes by Margaret Sanger

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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 periodwe prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.
Margaret Sanger
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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
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As a cause becomes more and more successful, the ideas of the people engaged in it are bound to change.
Margaret Sanger
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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 and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.
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
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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
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... it has always been the depth of my belief, my faith, or my love that was the mainspring of my behavior. When once I believed in doing a thing, nothing could prevent my doing it.
Margaret Sanger
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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
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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.
Margaret Sanger
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Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.
Margaret Sanger
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I resolved that women should have knowledge of contraception. They have every right to know about their own bodies. I would strikeout--I would scream from the housetops. I would tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women. I would be heard. No matter what it should cost. I would be heard.
Margaret Sanger
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Women must have economic and social equality with men.
Margaret Sanger
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Birth control is nothing more or less than...weeding out the unfit.
Margaret Sanger
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The procreation of [the diseased, the feeble-minded and paupers] should be stopped.
Margaret Sanger
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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
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No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.
Margaret Sanger
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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.
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
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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
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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