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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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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
Problem
Defective
Today
Discouraging
Urgent
Mentally
Physically
Limit
Discourage
Contrary
Eugenics
Limits
Fertility

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Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.
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Like begets like. We gather perfect fruit from perfect trees... . Abused soil brings forth stunted growths.
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Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying . . . demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism.
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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.
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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.
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As a cause becomes more and more successful, the ideas of the people engaged in it are bound to change.
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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.
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Give dysgenic groups [people with 'bad genes'] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.
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The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.
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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 tryanny of Christianity no less than Capitalism.
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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.
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Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native born Americans.
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Very early in my childhood I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jail with large families.
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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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Every single case of 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
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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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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.
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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.
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We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all-that the wealth of individuals and of state is being diverted from the development and the progress of human expression and civilization.
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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