“For the X millions of years of our existence as a species, the odds against a child’s surviving to adulthood were very great. Germs, malnutrition, accidents, infections made the bringing up of a child to manhood or womanhood a kind of triumph in itself… Miscarriages caused by overwork and too little food were far more numerous than they are now, while the plagues of smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, cholera and finally colic were not unknown. It is possible but not provable that this screening for manhood and womanhood weeded out the weaklings, the whiners, the chronic failures, the neurotic, the violent, and the accident-prone; but we know from history that these factors did not eliminate all the stupid.”

– John Steinbeck’s America: The Pursuit of Happiness.” Weekend with Newsday (November 16, 1966)