Quotes About Eugenics

Fundamentally, racial hygiene was born of a new drive for society to be governed by scientific principles irrespective of all other considerations.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in an opinion upholding the constitutionality of such a law.

Over the course of a few generations, the average intelligence in an aristocratic family fell toward the population average, hastened by marriages that matched bride and groom by lineage, not ability.

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

The qualities of mongrels are rarely admirable, and the mixture of the Arab and negro types has produced a debased and cruel breed, more shocking because they are more intelligent than the primitive savages.

The German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal.

The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein's 1942 tale 'Beyond This Horizon.'

Do-gooding is like treating hemophilia—the real cure is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death . . . before they breed more hemophiliacs.

anecdote tells of a meeting in 1923 between Nobel Prize laureate Anatole France and the beautiful and talented dancer Isadora Duncan. Discussing the then popular eugenics movement, Duncan said, 'Just imagine a child with my beauty and your brains!' France responded, 'Yes, but imagine a child with my beauty and your brains.')

Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes penned the majority opinion, which included these immortal words: It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler used his paper as a megaphone to promote eugenics, and universities such as Yale, Stanford, and Harvard bestowed their academic credibility to the cause.

two decades later the Rockefeller Foundation helped establish the Berlin-based Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics.

Progressives, it's true, admirably supported suffrage, ended child labor, and enacted other necessary reforms, but it's also undeniable that many embraced eugenics as a potential cure-all for a host of social ills.

Proponents of eugenics pursued this policy of racial improvement through controlled breeding, providing justification for such policies as forced sterilization, segregation laws, marriage restrictions — and, later, abortion. The

Natural selection must be replaced by eugenical artificial selection. This idea constitutes the sound core of eugenics, the applied science of human betterment.

The science fiction author, H.G. Wells was an avid supporter of eugenics and a believer in a hierarchy of the races.

The great irony, rarely recognized, is that abortion in America was initially conceived and advocated for the purpose of reducing the black population. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and one of the champions of the abortion rights movement, was an unapologetic eugenicist and a racist, and wanted minorities and the poor to have abortions.

Abortion was seen by her as a way of "improving" the population. She did not intend its widespread use among whites, and is famous for her slogan "More [children] from the fit, and less from the unfit." Who are the unfit? The black poor.

Hitler's cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps.

A lot of well-meaning and important people take an interest in eugenics," Father said, still maintaining that curiously even tone. "Roosevelt does. Alexander Graham Bell does." "And Margaret Sanger," Mother chipped in. "A number of progressives.

As we consider the fast pace of scientific and technological progress in our modern world, we must not lose our moral compass and give way to 'free market eugenics'.

If we could honestly promise young couples that we knew how to give them offspring with superior character, why should we assume they would decline? Common sense tells us that if scientists find ways to greatly improve human capabilities, there will no stopping the public from happily seizing them.

The real question is, can we prevent the ignorant, the poor, the vicious, from filling the world with their children?

Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind