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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.

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
Understanding
Raises
Light
Issue
Human
Intelligence
Humans
Birth
Question
Gutter
Control
Gutters
Issues
Obscenity
Greatest
Raise

More quotes by 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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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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The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.
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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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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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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Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native born Americans.
Margaret Sanger
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I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther.
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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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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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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Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying . . . demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism.
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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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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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
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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.
Margaret Sanger
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Birth control is nothing more or less than...weeding out the unfit.
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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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