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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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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
Children
Mentally
Physically
Healthy
Parents
Parent
Childbearing
Though
Tuberculosis
Born
Syphilis
Find
Defective

More quotes by 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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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.
Margaret Sanger
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I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther.
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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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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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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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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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 masses of Negroes...particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disasterously, 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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It is a noteworthy fact that not one of the women to whom I have spoken so far believes in abortion as a practice but it is principle for which they are standing. They also believe that the complete abolition of the abortion law will shortly do away with abortions, as nothing else will.
Margaret Sanger
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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
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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.
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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The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.
Margaret Sanger
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Very early in my childhood I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jail with large families.
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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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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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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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.
Margaret Sanger
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Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.
Margaret Sanger