Famous quotes containing the words birth, rate and/or decline:
“... the black girls didnt get these pills because their black ministers were up on the pulpit saying that birth control pills were black genocide. What Im saying is that black men have exploited black women.... They didnt want them to have any choice about their reproductive health. And if you cant control your reproduction, you cant control your life.”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)
“As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with characters, or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons in history. History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (18991973)
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (18651939)