Margaret Sanger
Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers - and before it can be his, it is hers alone.Collection: Alone
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.Collection: Women
The submission of her body without love or desire is degrading to the woman's finer sensibility, all the marriage certificates on earth to the contrary notwithstanding.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Medical
When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.Collection: Mom
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.
A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.
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.
War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.
She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.
Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.
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.Collection: Money
Blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race.Collection: Race
The most successful educational approach to the Negro is throgh a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the Minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.Collection: Religious
Eugenics is ... the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.Collection: Eugenics
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.Collection: Weed
Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native born Americans.Collection: Southern
The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.Collection: Family
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.Collection: Christian
Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.Collection: Eugenics
Birth Control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.Collection: Weed
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.Collection: Girl
Birth control is nothing more or less than...weeding out the unfit.Collection: Weed
I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan.Collection: Eugenics
No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child without a permit for parenthood.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Children
The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.Collection: Eugenics
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.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Race
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.Collection: Children
Hordes of people [are] born, who live, yet who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race one iota. Their lives are hopeless repetitions… Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world; we must cultivate our garden.Collection: Weed
Has knowledge of birth control, so carefully guarded and so secretly practiced by the women of the wealthy class - and so tenaciously withheld from the working women - brought them misery? Rather, has it not promoted greater happiness, greater freedom, greater prosperity and more harmony among them? The women who have this knowledge are the women who have been free to develop, free to enjoy in its best sense, and free to advance the interests of the community.Collection: Class
In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the idea of 'fit' and 'unfit.' Who is to decide this question? The grosser, the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the writings of the representative Eugenists [sic], one cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails.Collection: Writing
The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . .Collection: Mother
Some lives drift here and there like reeds in a stream, depending on changing currents for their activity. Others are like swimmers knowing the depth of the water. Each stroke helps them onward to a definite objective.Collection: Knowing
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.Collection: Taken
The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . . Memories of mother drying my tears, reading aloud, cutting cookies and singing as she did, listening to prayers I said as I knelt with my forehead pressed against her knee, tucking me in bed and turning down the light. They have carried me through the years and given my life such a firm foundation that it does not rock beneath flood or tempest.Collection: Mom
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.Collection: Eye
I cannot refrain from saying that women must come to recognize there is some function of womanhood other than being a child-bearing machine.Collection: Children
If we are really to live at all we must put our convictions into action.Collection: Action
The real hope of the world lies in putting as painstaking thought into the business of mating as we do into other big businesses.Collection: Real
No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.Collection: Children
Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.Collection: Race
Birth control is the means by which woman attains basic freedom.Collection: Mean
The procreation of [the diseased, the feeble-minded and paupers] should be stopped.Collection: Should
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.Collection: Life