Quotes About Eugenics

When Adolf Hitler was imprisoned in 1924, he learned of the Kallikaks in a book he read about heredity. Soon after, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, in which he mimicked the language of American eugenicists, declaring that sterilization of defective people "is the most humane act of mankind.

To eliminate feeblemindedness, Goddard rejected the calls of people like McKim to kill the feebleminded. But he did want to make sure they didn't get to have children. And by "they," Goddard mostly meant women.

Goddard conjured up a specter of attractive, feebleminded women wantonly seducing decent men. He warned that the country's reformatories were full of feebleminded girls who "do not conform to the conventions of society," who were "boy crazy" or, worst of all, "preferred the company of colored men to white.

The story of the Kallikaks, Goddard concluded, was a powerful argument for rounding up the feebleminded and putting them in colonies, at least until a better solution could be found.

According to Goddard's standards, 47 percent of the white soldiers and 89 percent of the blacks should be categorized as morons. The average white soldier, the psychologists found, had a mental age of thirteen years, just barely above the cutoff for feeblemindedness. The majority of Americans, in other words, was feebleminded or close to it.

In 1939, Hitler expanded his campaign against the feebleminded, launching a program to kill children judged to be idiots, along with those suffering deformities. Their parents were told that they had died during surgery or due to an accidental overdose of sedatives.

The program, known as T4, would ultimately claim 200,000 lives. It operated on a scale so far beyond what the Nazis had attempted before that they had to invent new technology for the slaughter—including gas chambers. McKim's eugenic dream had become real.

Galton recognized that in order to win people to his cause, he would need, as he put it, "a brief word to express the science of improving stock." In 1883, he came up with an enduring term: eugenics.

In the years after he was forced out of Vineland, Goddard drifted away from the eugenics movement. Rather than figuring out how to keep the feebleminded from having children, Goddard spent his time trying to find ways to help children, no matter their condition. "As for myself," Goddard once said, "I think I have gone over to the enemy.

Des « bâtards du Rhin », environ la moitié (soit trois cent quatre-vingt-cinq) fut stérilisée23.

Ich finde, wenn Kinder geboren werden, die man nicht haben will, dann sollten sie gleich tot gemacht werden, ehe sie Seelen kriegen, und man sollte sie gar nicht groß werden und herum laufen lassen!

Surrogate decision making is the common thread in the highly disparate crusades which have captured the imagination and sparked the fervor of the anointed at various times, whether this moral surrogacy was in the form of the eugenics movement, Keynesian economics, or environmentalism. All urgently require the superior wisdom of the anointed to be imposed on the benighted masses, in order to avert disaster.

The 1927 Supreme Court ruling that allowed Carrie Buck to be forcibly sterilized gave every state the green light to continue or begin sterilizing those deemed unfit to produce children, all in the name of "race betterment.

The mid-eighteen-thirties marked the rise of eugenics and racialism, with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference.

Why did the Master Race movement draw nothing but mental and physical cripples?

The idea that it was the state's business to know what was good for people—while we accept it uncomplainingly in school curriculums and hospital practices—smacked of eugenics and perhaps euthanasia.

Eugenics—the 'science' of racial improvement—was more than an Edwardian-era fad, like vegetarianism or rambling (though it often appealed to the same constituencies).

And few can deny that welfarism, taken to extremes, carries a whiff of do as you're told!: there were moments in postwar Scandinavia when the enthusiasm for eugenics and social efficiency suggested not just a certain insensitivity to recent history but also to the natural human desire for autonomy and independence.

To Hell with all racialists,' she said aloud. 'And to Hell with eugenics, degenerate heredity, miscegenation and frauds who pile up skulls like a conqueror as well. May they choke on their bones.' A passing gentleman boggled at her and crossed to the other side of La Trobe Street. 'There is no place for them in the Kingdom of Heaven,' she added, rolling the phrase over her tongue and filing it for future reference.

descendant of one of the First Families of Virginia. He held that the only way to tell the pure whites from the imitation whites, was to study their family trees. He claimed that such a nationwide investigation would disclose the various non-Nordic strains in the population. Laws, said he, should then be passed forbidding these strains from mixing or marrying with the pure strains that had produced such fine specimens of mankind as Mr. Snobbcraft and himself.

he claimed, that there must be as many as twenty million people in the United States who possessed some slight non-Nordic strain and were thus unfit for both citizenship and procreation.

Eventually 400,000 Germans were sterilized, and the Vatican did not issue a Pastoral Letter against it for another decade, only after the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Nazis).23,I

In our early days she went with me to the eugenics meetings, but that period soon ended.

The dullest person, after all, has gleaned from mere observation that highly intelligent parents often produce offspring so stupid that they can barely breathe. (And, much more interesting from the eugenic point of view, that the opposite is also true.)