Margaret Sanger Quotes

“Like the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, postmodernism seeks to institutionalize dishonesty as a legitimate school of thought. The idea of truth as the ultimate goal of the intellectual is discarded. In its place, scholars are asked to pursue political objectives--so long as those political objectives are the 'correct' ones. Postmodernism is not fringe within the community of scholars. It is central. This tells us a great deal about the life of the mind today. Peruse any university course catalogue, and you find names like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. Scour the footnotes of scholarly books and journals and a similar story unfolds. With the primacy of philosophies--postmodernism, Critical Theory, and even the right-leaning Straussianism--that exalt dishonesty in the service of supposedly noble causes, is it at all surprising that liars like Alfred Kinsey, Rigoberta Menchu, Alger Hiss, and Margaret Sanger have achieved a venerated status among the intellectuals?”
― Daniel J. Flynn, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas

“Mrs. Sanger was a woman who would have understood my mother, I was sure.”
― Gertrude Beasley, My First Thirty Years

“An easy and even a pleasant task is it to reduce human problems to numerical figures in black and white on charts and graphs, an infinitely difficult one is it to suggest concrete solutions, or to extend true charity in individual lives. Yet life can only be lived in the individual; almost invariably the individual refuses to conform to the theories and the classifications of the statistician.”
― Margaret Sanger, Motherhood in Bondage

“Members of society who are wealthy, or whose livelihood is guaranteed by an institution, or whose religious commitments ensure that they will never have to choose between abortion (or other forms of birth control) and being saddled with the many burdens of parenthood—all these sheltered classes can easily approach all moral problems on an exclusively literate plane, with comforting words that give no hint of numerate realities, including the afflictions that time will bring. Margaret Sanger's experience as a nurse in daily contact with the wretchedly poor made her see the numerate realities that were effectively invisible to the sheltered classes — until she rubbed their noses in raw life. Opening the eyes of the socially blind required the creation of new terms: birth control in 1914 and planned parenthood in the 1930s. Literate approaches frequently deceive, but (with imagination) words can be made to serve the goals of intelligent numeracy. Compassionate souls soon see that all of society benefits when women are freed from the necessity of bearing unwanted babies. (It is remarkable how often a human ostrich who seeks to impose compulsory pregnancy and mandatory motherhood on women lightly belittles a woman's request for an abortion as being no more than a "whim.")”
― Garrett Hardin, The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia