Philosophy

"The dangers of foreign immigration lie in the overflow to our shores of hereditary unfitness. The causes that lead to degeneration have ling been at work among the poor of Europe."

"The strong races were born of hard times, they have fought for all they have had, and the strength of those they have conquered has entered into their wills. They have been selected by competition and sifted by the elements. They have risen through struggle and they have gained through mutual help, and by the power of the human will have made the earth their own."

"If Richard Roe by chance is defective, unable by heredity to rise to the level of helpfulness and happiness, it is not a wholesome act to help him to the responsibilities of parenthood. It is a wise charity to make him as comfortable as may be with the assurance that he shall be the last of his line."

"The second [eugenic goal] is the limitation by public authority of the marriage of the defective, the insane, and the criminal."

"Poverty, dirt, and crime are the products of those, in general, who are not good material."

"We have also the pedigrees of the dissolute, the feeble-minded, the idle, the defective. We find in these that evil and weakness rarely originate de novo, but that they are handed down as a baneful legacy from generation to generation."

"And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into their estimate of advantages."

"Society must concern itself not chiefly with the isolation, temporary or permanent, of the individual murderer, thief, or forger, but with the extermination or repair of the genetic, educational, or industrial defects which cause the production of criminals."

"What we must fight for is freedom to breed the race without being hampered by the mass of irrelevant conditions implied in the institution of marriage. If our morality is attacked, we can carry the War into the enemy’s country by reminding the public that the real objection to breeding by marriage is that marriage places no restraint on debauchery as long as it is monogamic, whereas eugenic breeding would effectually protect the mothers and fathers of the race from any abuse of their relations. As to the domestic and sympathetic function of marriage, or even its selfishly sexual function, we need not interfere with that. ‘’’What we need is freedom for people who have never seen each other before, and never intend to see one another again, to produce children under certain definite public conditions, without loss of honor.’’’ That freedom once secured, and the conditions defined, we have nothing further to say in the matter until the necessarily distant time when the results of our alternative method of recruiting will be able to take the matter in hand themselves, and invite the world to reconsider its institutions in the light of experiments, which must, of course, in the meantime run concurrently with the promiscuity of ordinary marriage."

"The time has already come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of population, whether larger or smaller than at present or the same, is most expedient. And having settled this policy, we must take steps to carry it into operation. The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members."

"The aim of eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilization in their own way."

"[It] cannot be uniform: every [social] class must create its own eugenics."

"If at some point even 20% of the population uses embryo selection, it would be more than enough to reverse the current trends that we are seeing."

"The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."

"As an advocate of birth control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes."

"Eugenics without birth control seems to us a house built upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit."

"Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes."

"Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need [...] We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock."

"The first task of the new man is to restore the values of the body. He starts out from the demands and attributes of the body. This is the great revolution of the twentieth century which a section of French intellectuals have dimly sensed but which they have not been able to grasp clearly and communicate to the nation: the revolution of the body, restoration of the body […] The new man starts with the body, he knows that the body is the articulation of the soul, and that the soul can only express itself, reveal itself, acquire substance in the body. There is nothing more spiritual than this recognition of the body. It is the soul that calls, that demands salvation, that saves itself by rediscovering the body.Nothing is less materialist than this movement. The pathetic mistake of the last generation of rationalists, one which summed up all the dissolution, all the bastardization of their pseudo-humanism, was to accuse of materialism a revolution which salvages and restores the sources and mainstays of the spirit."

"Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes, and if our government cannot send them doctor and clinic it must, till it get tired of it, send monk and confession box. We cannot go back as some dreamers would have us, to the old way of big families everywhere, even if the intelligent classes would consent, because that old way worked through lack of science and consequent great mortality among the children of those least fitted for modem civilisation."

"Since about 1900 the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been more than replacing theirs. Unless there is a change in the public mind every rank above the lowest must degenerate, and, as inferior men push up into its gaps, degenerate more and more quickly. The results are already visible in the degeneration of literature, newspapers, amusements (there was once a stock company playing Shakespeare in every considerable town), and, I am convinced, in benefactions like that of Lord Nuffield, a self-made man, to Oxford, which must gradually substitute applied science for ancient wisdom."

"I was born human, but it was an accident of fate. … Humanity can change itself but hopefully it will be an individual choice. Those who want to stay human can and those who want to evolve into something much more powerful with greater capabilities can. There is no way I want to stay a mere human."

"Any new set of conditions which renders a species' food and safety very easily obtained, seems to lead to degeneration."

"[N]o man shall be subjected to any sort of mutilation or sterilisation except with his own deliberate consent, freely given."

"Let me suggest that Dr. Galton's concession to the fact that there are differences of type to consider is only the beginning of a very big descent of concession, that may finally carry him very deep indeed. Eugenics, which is really only a new word for the popular American term "stirpiculture," seems to me to be a term that is not without its misleading implications. It has in it something of that same lack of a fine appreciation of facts that enabled Herbert Spencer to coin those two most unfortunate terms, "evolution" and "the survival of the fittest." The implication is that the best reproduces and survives. Now really it is' the better that survives, and not the best. The real fact of the case is that in the all-around result the inferior usually perish, and the average of the species rises, but not that any exceptionally favorable variations get together and reproduce. I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies."

"In the same way as the state demands the death of its best men as soldiers, it is entitled to order the death of the condemned in its battle against epidemics and diseases. No antique sacrifices to gods and demons are demanded any longer, only a well considered expiation as a help for the community and indeed exclusively in its interest."

"Selective breeding can alter man's capacity to learn, to keep sane, to cherish justice or to be happy. There is no more certain and economical a way to improve man's environment as to improve his nature."

"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. 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."

"It appears after analyzing the Fabians rationale, that the ideological links of eugenic with democratic socialism is stronger than with Nazism, fascism and communism."

"But I see a third motive which unconsciously plays an important part; it is the idea of sacrifice. A lunatic may cause the mental and economic decay of a family and also ruin it morally. If healthy human beings make great sacrifices for the community and lay down their lives by order of the state, the insane person, if he could arouse himself mentally and make a decision, would choose a similar sacrifice for himself. Why should not the state be allowed to enact this sacrifice in his case and impose on him what he would want to do himself?""

"[T]he campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics."

"The only remedy, if one be possible at all, is to alter the relative fertility of the good and the bad stocks in the community."

"While modern social conditions are removing the crude physical checks which the unrestrained struggle for existence places on the over-fertility of the unfit, they may at the same time be leading to a lessened relative fertility in those physically and mentally fitter stocks, from which the bulk of our leaders have hitherto been drawn."

"[T]here is a fundamental difference between a regulatory system where eugenics [under whatever name] is practised for the well-being of the individual - whether human or non-human - and an authoritarian society where eugenics is practised for the notional benefit of a class, race or nation."

"Birth control and abortion are turning out to be great eugenic advances of our time. If they had been advanced for eugenic reasons, it would have retarded or stopped their acceptance."

"If you don't include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society... So what happens? There will be less bright people to support dumb people in the next generation. That's a problem."

"Eugenics is dead."

"The eugenics movement resists cramming into a single, unambiguous political box. ...When the Supreme Court, in the greatest victory [,] of the American eugenics movement, upheld compulsory sterilization of the mentally unfit in 1927, all liberal justices voted aye; the single dissent in this eight-to-one ruling was filed by Pierce Butler,] the court's most conservative member, a catholic who upheld his church's position on reproductive controls."

"Passing from quantity to quality of population, we come to the question of eugenics. We may perhaps assume that, if people grow less superstitious, government will acquire the right to sterilize those who are not considered desirable as parents. This power will be used, at first, to diminish imbecility, a most desirable object. But probably, in time, opposition to the government will be taken to prove imbecility, so that rebels of all kinds will be sterilized. Epileptics, consumptives, dipsomaniacs and so on will gradually be included; in the end, there will be a tendency to include all who fail to pass the usual school examinations. The result will be to increase the average intelligence; in the long run, it may be greatly increased. But probably the effect upon really exceptional intelligence will be bad. Mr. Micawber, who was Dickens's father, would hardly have been regarded as a desirable parent. How many imbeciles ought to outweigh one Dickens I do not profess to know.Eugenics has, of course, more ambitious possibilities in a more distant future. It may aim not only at eliminating undesired types, but at increasing desired types. Moral standards may alter so as to make it possible for one man to be the sire of a vast progeny by many different mothers. When men of science envisage a possibility of this kind, they are prone to a type of fallacy which is common also in other directions. They imagine that a reform inaugurated by men of science would be administered as men of science would wish, by men similar in outlook to those who have advocated it. In like manner women who advocated votes for women used to imagine that the woman voter of the future would resemble the ardent feminist who won her the vote; and socialist leaders imagine that a socialist State would be administered by idealistic reformers like themselves. These are, of course, delusions; a reform, once achieved, is handed over to the average citizen. So, if eugenics reached the point where it could increase desired types, it would not be the types desired by present-day eugenists that would be increased, but rather the type desired by the average official. Prime Ministers, Bishops, and others whom the State considers desirable might become the fathers of half the next generation. Whether this would be an improvement it is not for me to say, as I have no hope of ever becoming either a Bishop or a Prime Minister."

"The more severely burdened should not propagate themselves… If we do nothing but make mental and physical cripples capable of propagating themselves, and the healthy stocks have to limit the number of their children because so much has to be done for the maintenance of others, if natural selection is generally suppressed, then unless we will get new measures our race must rapidly deteriorate."

"60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too."

"The keystone of the new social structure, the pivotal factor of advancing civilization, the guide of the new religion, is biology; for man is an animal, and his characteristics, his requirements, and his reactions can be recorded and studied quite as carefully and precisely as those of any other animal."

"Die dummen Moralisten haben immer die Veredelung angestrebt ohne zugleich die Basis zu wollen: die leibliche Veradlichung [...][,] sie haben an’s Individuum gedacht und nicht an die Fortdauer des Edlen durch Zeugung. Kurzsichtig!"

"Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection."

"The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so."

"We belong to a time in which culture is in danger of being destroyed by the means of culture."

"One can justly be proud of an unbroken line of good ancestors, up to one's father-but not proud of the line, for everyone has that. The descent from good ancestors makes up true nobility of birth; one single interruption in that chain, one evil ancestor, and the nobility of birth is cancelled out. Everyone who speaks of his nobility should be asked whether he has no violent, greedy, dissolute, malicious, or cruel man among his ancestors. If he can thereupon answer "no" in good conscience, one should court his friendship."

"If a man has no sons, he has no full right to speak about the needs of a single matter of state. He has to have risked with the others what is most precious to him; only then is he bound firmly to the state. One must consider the happiness of one's descendants, and so, above all, have descendants, in order to take a proper, natural part in all institutions and their transformation. The development of higher morality depends on a man's having sons: this makes him unselfish, or, more exactly, it expands his selfishness over time, and allows him seriously to pursue goals beyond his individual lifetime."

"This is the law of Mendel,And often he maken it plain, Defectives will breed defectives, And the insane breed insane.Oh why do we allow these peopleTo breed back to the monkey's nest,To increase our country's burdensWhen we should only breed the best?"

"I believe in striving to raise the human race to the highest plane of social organization, of cooperative work and of effective endeavor.""I believe that I am the trustee of the germ plasm that I carry; that this has been passed on to me through thousands of generations before me; and that I betray the trust if (that germ plasm being good) I so act as to jeopardize it, with its excellent possibilities, or, from motives of personal convenience, to unduly limit offspring." "I believe that, having made our choice in marriage carefully, we, the married pair, should seek to have 4 to 6 children in order that our carefully selected germ plasm shall be reproduced in adequate degree and that this preferred stock shall not be swamped by that less carefully selected." "I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits." "I believe in repressing my instincts when to follow them would injure the next generation."