Margaret Sanger Quotes

Very early in my childhood I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jail with large families.

I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther.

The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.

A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts.

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.

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.

No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.

More children from the fit, less from the unfit -- that is the chief aim of birth control.

Couples should be required to submit applications to have a child.

The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Give dysgenic groups [people with 'bad genes'] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.

The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.

No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child without a permit for parenthood.

Birth control is nothing more or less than...weeding out the unfit.

I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.

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.

The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.

Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native born Americans.

Blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race.