Quotes about Scientific Racism

Francis Galton

Eugenics.

Harold Fielding-Hall

The Eugenist takes man purely as a plant or as an animal; he wants to breed him just as animals are bred.

The Eugenics Movement, which grew quite popular for a while, tried to improve the race of man, not by improving individual people or even a generation of people, but of selective and restrictive breeding of humans. The coercion and bias associated with it caused one of the worst violations of human rights in American History, and then was picked up by Adolf Hitler who carried the ideas to one of the worst atrocities in human history—the murder of “inferior races” so that they could not breed, thereby in their warped theory developing a super race.

Jonathan Sacks

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.

Voltaire

It is a serious question among them whether they [Africans] are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals [monkeys] will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.

This quotation in interesting in that the notion of species descending from other species was known to French intellectuals even before Darwin. Specifically the relationship between man and monkeys had their attention. Voltaire had a strong concept of evolutionary possibilities and the importance of time in the process. He assumed monkeys would evolve further and take on many of the attributes of man. Of course he did not realize that there were common ancestors shared by man and monkeys, and man is what the monkey ancestors had evolved to and the monkeys had evolved to their present form which was all they needed to thrive in their environment. He did not realize that evolution is not necessarily in an upward direction of human like capability other than the ability to survive and thrive.

Stephen Jay Gould

Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists; they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal adult behavior in lower races.

Frederick Osborn

The German sterilization program is apparently an excellent one. Taken altogether, recent developments in Germany constitute perhaps the most important social experiment which has ever been tried.

At the time there were some Americans who supported Hitler and Fascism. Even senior military men like Osborne.

Tom Reiss

Anthropology seems so bland and friendly now, but in the early 20th century, Jews could only be dissected badly by these fields. The Jews were extremely assimilated; it's a different world than now.

Rudolphe Tomaschek

Modern Physics is an instrument of Jewry for the destruction of Nordic science…

German Jewish scientists were at first unwelcome and discriminated against as the Nazi’s gained power, Then they were banned from participating in most university and other scientific projects and institutes, Many began to leave Germany, and then the remaining ones were sent to concentration camps and mostly murdered. But the ones who had escaped came mostly to England and America. Before this started, Germany had the best physics research in the world. By the end of the war, the “German Jewish Scientists (like Albert Einstein) not only were helping to make America the world’s best physics research center, but were instrumental in developing the atomic bomb which Nazi Germany could not develop because there were not enough great scientists left.

Richard Spencer

Racist isn’t a descriptive word. It’s a pejorative word. It is the equivalent of saying, ‘I don’t like you.’ ‘Racist’ is just a slur word. I think race is real, and I think race is important. And those two principles do not mean I want to harm someone or hate someone. But the notion that these people can be equal is not a scientific way of looking at it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The whole point of the Eugenic pseudo-scientific theories is that they are to be applied wholesale, by some more sweeping and generalizing money power than the individual husband or wife or household. Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's.

Cornel West

The authority of science promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies. Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality. In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Slavery in America was perpetuated not merely by human badness but also by human blindness. ... Men convinced themselves that a system that was so economically profitable must be morally justifiable. ... Science was commandeered to prove the biological inferiority of the Negro. Even philosophical logic was manipulated [exemplified by] an Aristotlian syllogism:
All men are made in the image of God;
God, as everyone knows, is not a Negro;
Therefore, the Negro is not a man.

Nick Harkaway

Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity.

Scientific Racism Quotes