Quotes from Andrew Carroll

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.

We have to assume that the people whose dwelling-places, artefacts, lives even, we are dealing with were rational, integrated, sane and sensible human beings. Then we look around at our own contemporaries and wonder how this belief can possibly be sustained.

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.

The Carnegie Institution funded a Long Island laboratory in 1904 that began keeping tabs on the physical traits of half a million American citizens

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny.… " —Author and former biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov

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.

At its best, history nurtures within us humility and gratitude. It encourages respect and empathy. It fosters creativity and stimulates the imagination. It inspires resilience. And it does so by illuminating the simple truth that, whether due to some cosmic fluke or divine providence, it's an absolute miracle that any one of us is alive today, walking around on this tiny sphere surrounded by an ocean of space, and that we are, above everything else, all in this together.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. —From "On Listening to Lectures" by Plutarch