Margaret Sanger Quotes

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.

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

I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control would prefer.

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

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply the population.

Freedom to breed Is intolerable…. People vary. Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The differences will be accentuated, generation by generation.

Our primary objective is to reduce British over-population. But many leaders of foreign nations approach us to help them get a handle on their burgeoning population.

There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels.

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.

Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.

We have access to practical, ethical and scientifically established methods of birth control. So I think that is the most ethical way to reduce our population.

One of the best things people could do for their descendents would be to sharply limit the number of them.

No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion.... Indeed, abortion, legal and illegal, now has become the most widespread fertility control method in use in the world today...

The great danger to my mind is Pakistan's inability to control its population. Of course, it's very difficult for the Muslims to have contraception, but if they put their mind to it, I think it's quite possible. It is only the radical Islamist man who actually opposes it, but there is a lot of evidence in Islamic thinking that you can actually have contraception, and prevent your population from breaking all bounds

We never use the phrase population control. It has an implication of coercion.

The evidence is pretty strong: if you have access to family planning and birth control, the abortion rate is going to go down.

The problem of burgeoning population can be addressed if we begin with women itself. And, we need to educate them and spread awareness about birth control and family planning through TV channels and newspapers.

No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.

The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.

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.

Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.

I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding

We're the ones causing global warming. In fact, what we ought to be saying is population growth is a major cause of it, so I hope to have a T-shirt out very, very soon: Stop global warming, use condoms.

Birth Control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science. . . as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.

It is a simple logic truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death –rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.