Eugenic Quotes

“My firm conviction is that if wide-spread Eugenic reforms are not adopted during the next hundred years or so, our Western Civilization is inevitably destined to such a slow and gradual decay as that which has been experienced in the past by every great ancient civilization. The size and the importance of the United States throws on you a special responsibility in your endeavours to safeguard the future of our race. Those who are attending your Congress will be aiding in this endeavour, and though you will gain no thanks from your own generation, posterity will, I believe, learn to realize the great dept it owes to all the workers in this field.”

— Leonard Darwin

“These various remedies, eugenic, educational, ethical, populist and socialist, all assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress towards such an ideal. I think [democracy] is a false ideal.”

— Walter Lippmann

“The whole point of the Eugenic pseudo-scientific theories is that they are to be applied wholesale, by some more sweeping and generalizing money power than the individual husband or wife or household. Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene.”

— Gary Wolf

“Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.”

— Havelock Ellis

“We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living ... A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need ... We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.”

— Margaret Sanger

“Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under another name than eugenics.”

— Frederick Osborn

“Birth Control and abortion are turning out to be the great eugenic advances of our time.”

— Frederick Osborn

“The most important eugenic policy at this time is to see that birth control is made equally available to all individuals in every class of society”

— Frederick Osborn

“Living in, and promoting a eugenic White society. This means that we take particular care in not only assuring the perpetuation of our precious White Race, but we take deliberate care that the misfits are culled and that each generation advances to higher and more salubrious levels, physically, aesthetically, and mentally.”

— Ben Klassen

“There is no permanent status quo in nature; all is the process of adjustment and readjustment, or else eventual failure. But man is the first being yet evolved on earth which has the power to note this changefulness, and, if he will, to turn it to his own advantage, to work out genetic methods, eugenic ideas, yes, to invent new characteristics, organs, and biological systems that will work out to further the interests, the happiness, the glory of the God-like being whose meager foreshadowings we the present ailing creatures are.”

— Hermann Joseph Muller

“The partisans of eugenic planning hear that other music, the music that says that there shall be nothing random in the world, nothing independent, nothing moved by its own vitality, nothing out of keeping with some idea: even our children must not be our progeny, but our creation.”

— Charles Frankel

“The implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a World Organization ... Political unification in some sort of World Government will be required ... Even though ... any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”

— Julian Huxley

“The Eugenic Society ... is perpetually bewailing the fact that wage-earners breed faster than middle-class people.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.”

— Walter Lippmann

“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.”

— Margaret Sanger