There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.
—John F. Kennedy (1917–63) American Head of State, Journalist
A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.
—Georges Gurdjieff (1877–1949) Armenian Spiritual Leader, Occultist
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
—Walter Benjamin
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
—Germaine Greer (b.1939) Australia Academic, Journalist, Scholar, Writer
What is this talked-of mystery of birth but being mounted bareback on the earth?
—Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet
Every person is a God in embryo. Its only desire is to be born.
—Deepak Chopra (b.1946) Indian-born American Physician, Public Speaker, Writer
We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) Swiss-born French Philosopher
Good birth is a fine thing, but the merit is our ancestors.
—Plutarch (c.46–c.120 CE) Greek Biographer, Philosopher
It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-born British Philosopher
Birth was the death of him.
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) Irish Novelist, Playwright
It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
Telegram to a friend who had just become a mother after a prolonged pregnancy: Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American Humorist, Journalist
Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing. Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it’s the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband’s mood.
—Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) French Political leader, Revolutionary, Novelist, Poet, Critic
These wretched babies don’t come until they are ready.
—Queen Elizabeth II (b.1926) Queen of United Kingdom
Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.
—Samuel Butler
We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity…. But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.
—Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1327) German Christian Mystic
High birth is a gift of fortune which should never challenge esteem toward those who receive it, since it costs them neither study nor labor.
—Jean de La Bruyere (1645–96) French Satiric Moralist, Author
My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt; helpless, naked, piping loud, like a fiend hid in a cloud.
—William Blake (1757–1827) English Poet, Painter, Printmaker
What is birth to a man if it be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?
—Philip Sidney (1554–86) English Soldier Poet, Courtier
I have no conscience, none, but I would not like to bring a soul into this world. When it sinned and when it suffered something like a dead hand would fall on me,—“You did it, you, for your own pleasure you created this thing! See your work!” If it lived to be eighty it would always hang like a millstone round my neck, have the right to demand good from me, and curse me for its sorrow. A parent is only like to God: if his work turns out bad so much the worse for him; he dare not wash his hands of it. Time and years can never bring the day when you can say to your child, “Soul, what have I to do with you?”
—Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) South African Writer, Feminist
Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.
—Andy Warhol (1928–87) American Painter, Printmaker, Film Personality
For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
—The Holy Bible Scripture in the Christian Faith
We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.
—Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) British Historian
Compassion and shame come over one who considers how precarious is the origin of the proudest of living beings: often the smell of a lately extinguished lamp is enough to cause a miscarriage. And to think that from such a frail beginning a tyrant or butcher may be born! You who trust in your physical strength, who embrace the gifts of fortune and consider yourself not their ward but their son, you who have a domineering spirit, you who consider yourself a god as soon as success swells your breast, think how little could have destroyed you!
—Pliny the Elder (23–79CE) Roman Statesman, Scholar
I’m hurt, hurt and humiliated beyond endurance, seeing the wheat ripening, the fountains never ceasing to give water, the sheep bearing hundreds of lambs, the she-dogs, until it seems the whole country rises to show me its tender sleeping young while I feel two hammer-blows here instead of the mouth of my child.
—Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish Poet
Of all vanities and fopperies, the vanity of high birth is the greatest. True nobility is derived from virtue, not from birth. Titles, indeed, may be purchased; but virtue is the only coin that makes the bargain valid.
—Richard Burton (1925–84) Welsh Actor
Willful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement. No man, no woman, can shirk the primary duties of life, whether for love of ease and pleasure, or for any other cause, and retain his or her self-respect.
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American Head of State, Political leader, Historian, Explorer
I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition.
—Thomas Browne (1605–82) English Author, Physician
After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
—Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German Philosopher
What a strange thing is the propagation of life! A bubble of seed which may be spilt in a whore’s lap, or in the orgasm of a voluptuous dream, might (for aught we know) have formed a Caesar or a Bonaparte—there is nothing remarkable recorded of their sires, that I know of.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
—Annie Dillard (b.1945) Essayist, Novelist, Poet, Naturalist, Mystic
Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor—because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them… because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them.
—Angela Davis (b.1944) American Political Activist, Academic
Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
—Erich Fromm (1900–80) German-American Psychoanalyst, Social Philosopher
Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English Essayist
I positively think that ladies who are always enceinte quite disgusting; it is more like a rabbit or guinea-pig than anything else and really it is not very nice.
—Queen Victoria (1819–1901) British Royal
I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim… lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.
—Ezra Pound (1885-1972) American Poet, Translator, Critic
Although it is generally known, I think it’s about time to announce that I was born at a very early age.
—Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American Actor, Comedian, Singer
If men were equally at risk from this condition—if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains—then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies.
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b.1941) American Social Critic, Essayist
Most of a modest woman’s life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
When real nobleness accompanies the imaginary one of birth, the imaginary mixes with the real and becomes real too.
—George Greville, 2nd Earl of Warwick (1746–1816) British Nobleman, Politician
Luckless is the country in which the symbols of procreation are the objects of shame, while the agents of destruction are honored! And yet you call that member your pudendum, or shameful part, as if there were anything more glorious than creating life, or anything more atrocious than taking it away.
—Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–55) French Soldier, Duelist, Writer
I came to the place of my birth and cried, “The friends of my youth, where are they?” And echo answered, “Where are they?”
—Arabic Proverb
He plough’d her, and she cropp’d.
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616) British Playwright
Behold, I was shapened in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.
—The Holy Bible Scripture in the Christian Faith
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and comet from afar: not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Poet
Our birth is nothing but our death begun, as tapers waste the moment they take fire.
—Edward Young (1683–1765) English Poet
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
—Florynce Kennedy (1916–2000) American Lawyer, Civil Rights Leader, Feminist, Activist
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b.1929) American Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer