There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passiona...te than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas ... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Angel that presided o'er my birth Said, "Little creature, formed of Joy and Mirth,... Go love without the help of any thing on earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Endeavor, as much as you can, to keep company with people above you.... Do not mistake, when I say company above you, and think th...at I mean with regard to their birth; that is the least consideration; but I mean with regard to their merit, and the light in which the world considers them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't believe there is one woman within the confines of this state who does not believe in birth control. I never met one. That ...is, I never met one who thought that she should be kept in ignorance of contraceptive methods. Many I have met who valued the knowledge they possessed, but thought there were certain other classes who would be better kept in ignorance. The old would protect the young. The rich would keep the poor in ignorance. The good would keep their knowledge from the bad, the strong from the weak.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the black girls didn't get these pills because their black ministers were up on the pulpit saying that birth control pills wer...e black genocide. What I'm saying is that black men have exploited black women.... They didn't want them to have any choice about their reproductive health. And if you can't control your reproduction, you can't control your life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not a single man on earth knows from his own experience the how and where of his birth, only from tradition, which is often very u...ncertain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You need not be proud of me.... I'm only being active till you can be again--it isn't such a great desire on my part to serve the ...world and I'll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have ... succeeded in enlightening public opinion. We have battered down the prejudice of the press. We have overcome the apath...y and passive indifference of the medical profession. We have awakened the consciousness of the Protestant churches and their ethical leaders to the moral necessity of birth control. Yet this enlightenment, unless directed and applied, will be extinguished by the winds of dogmas unless it is applied like a hydro-electric power to the driving of the machinery of political and legislative action.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't really know how most of my ventures in this work were ever financed. I am of no economical turn of mind. I do things first..., and somehow or another they get paid for. If I had waited to finance my various battles for birth control, I do not suppose they ever would have become realities. I suppose here is the real difference between the idealist--or the "fanatic, as we are called--and the ordinary "normal" human being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »