"I am a great believer in the power of one person armed with the truth." David Bradt, Venice Beach, CA (quoted), NOCIRC Newsletter, Fall/Winter 1995

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead

"Help us tell the American medical community that we are holding it accountable for this horrendous fraud, that it is the inviolable birthright of all human beings to keep their genitals intact, that no one has the right to cut off a baby's foreskin, and that the genital altering of baby boys in this country must stop." Marilyn F. Milos, RN, Founder/Director, NOCIRC, NOCIRC Newsletter, Spring 1995

"A teacher touches eternity. He can never know where his influence stops." Henry Adams

"I have seen two medical students fight over the privilege of doing circumcision on the newborn, although these same students showed neither interest nor aptitude for opening boils or doing other surgical tasks." John M. Foley, MD, The Unkindest Cut of All, Fact Magazine, July-August 1966

"[I]t [circumcising babies] is really a touching, moving, spine-tingling thing that I participate in as a service to the community." Ilene Gelbaum, CNM, American College of Nurse-Midwifery Conference, Atlanta, May 13, 1990

"I always use the PlastiBell because it makes their penis look real nice." Midwife, Ocean Springs, Mississippi (about 1990)

"A remedy [for masturbation] which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the pain attending the operation will have a beneficial effect upon the mind." John Harvey Kellogg, MD, [the breakfast cereal tycoon] Plain Facts for Old and Young, 1888

"I can't stop myself!" Peter Lorre as the serial child killer in Fritz Lang's 1931 movie classic, M

"A million dollars." Thomas Wiswell, MD, advocate of routine circumcision, in response to question Marilyn Milos, RN, director of NOCIRC, asked him at the American Adademy of Pediatrics Annual Meeting, San Francisco, October 17, 1998: "What would it take for you to change your mind about circumcision?" (As related by Marilyn Milos, The Dr. Dean Edell Show, October 22, 1998)

"But deception is often nonverbal, and conveyed instead by gestures or false visual clues, as in situations where a clear risk ought to be pointed out." Encyclopedia of Bioethics, The Free Press, 1978

"It is the duty of physicians, who are frequent witnesses of the enormities committed by quackery, and the injury to health and even destruction of life caused by the use of quack medicines, to enlighten the public on these subjects, to expose the injuries sustained by the unwary from the devices and pretensions of artful empirics and impostors." Code of Ethics, American Medical Association, 1847

"Juridical logic and morality cannot acknowledge a distinction between female and male circumcision, both being the mutilation of healthy genital organs and therefore damaging to the physical integrity of the child, regardless of anyone's religious motives." Sami Aldeeb, Doctor of Law, Staff Legal Advisor, Swiss Institute of Comparative Law Speaker at the Third International Symposium on Circumcision

"When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us." Epigraph to Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker

"There are too few doctors who remember the original reason for playing doctor." Marco Vassi, "The Dying Gynecologist," The Metasex Manifesto

"Combining unnecessary episiotomies and routine male infant circumcision, the United States is the most genitally mutilating society in the world." Jody McLaughlin, Editor/Publisher, The Compleat Mother/

"I didn't know for a long time that I was dead." First sentence of Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker

"FGM [female genital mutilation] is not comparable to male circumcision, unless one considers male circumcision an amputation." Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder Congressional Record for House of Representatives, Feb. 14, 1995

"I will always hear the sound of the scissors cutting the flesh between my legs." Somalian filmmaker Soraya Mire, Fire Eyes

"Though these personal stories are told by women living thousands of miles apart, they are bound together by a common fate and by a shared experience imposed on them -- the mutilation of their bodies and lives ... To take control of our lives and to reach out beyond the narrow limits imposed on us in societies ruled by men, is a yearning that women share everywhere in the world. It is a goal we shall and must achieve for our children, and this is what this book is all about -- the need for change! The demand for recognition of our human rights is growing louder everywhere. This fundamental social revolution is bringing women together and gaining all over the world ... I hope that what is reported here will convince all who read it to join together in working for a new, free, open, and equal way of life." From the Preface of STOP Female Genital Mutilation / WOMEN SPEAK / Facts and Actions, by Fran P. Hosken

"The foreskin is a sewer." Pediatrician in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who circumcises every baby he can. Reported by Mary Conant, RN, Co-Founder, Nurses for the Rights of the Child.

"For millennia the male's preputial cavity has acted as a cesspool for infectious agents transmitting diseases." Gerald N. Weiss, MD, Prophylactic neonatal surgery and infectious diseases, Pediatric Infection Disease Journal 1997;16(8):727-734

"[A]rticles and editorials on the advantages and disadvantages of circumcision consistently fail to discuss the prepuce as a tissue worthy of preservation in its own right." The prepuce: specialized mucosa of the penis and its loss to circumcision, by J. R. Taylor, A. P. Lockwood and A. J. Taylor, British Journal of Urology (1996) 77, 291-295

"The foreskin of the human male is the principal sensory organ for the sixth sense of erogeny." George Hill, Letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 4/5/97

"A long foreskin is a treasure." Stan Emerson, NOCIRC of Wisconsin

"One can never be too rich or too thin or have too much foreskin." John A. Erickson, British Journal of Urology (Letters), August 1997

"My foreskin is my friend ... A doctor once told me that the purpose of the foreskin was to protect the penis of primitive man as he ran naked through the bushes ... I like to run through the bushes naked." John McMahon, "Circumcision Revisited," Circumcision: The Rest of the Story, edited by Peggy O'Mara, Mothering Special Edition, 1994

"I completed my foreskin restoration last summer, and my wife and I had a little celebration. My penis now looks and functions pretty much like the real thing. I can shower at a European spa without getting looks of pity, and sex is about 25 times as much fun as it used to be." Wayne Hampton (letter to editor), Men's Fitness, May 1995

"We ... cannot allow females or any group of patients to be mutilated. I'm afraid that this is even more basic than religion." John C. Nelson, MD, AMA Trustee, AMA News, October 28, 1996

"Circumcision of newborns should not be routinely performed." "Neonatal Circumcision Revisited," Fetus and Newborn Committee, Canadian Paediatric Society, Canadian Medical Association Journal, March 15, 1996, page 769

"The Australasian Association of Paediatric Surgeons has informed the College that Neonatal male circumcision has no medical indication. It is a traumatic procedure performed without anaesthesia to remove a normal functional and protective prepuce." Australian College of Paediatrics Position Statement on Routine Circumcision of Normal Male Infants and Boys (1996)

"The Australian College of Paediatrics should continue to discourage the practice of circumcision in newborns." Australian Medical Association (1996)

"To circumcise for therapeutic reasons where medical research has shown other techniques to be at least as effective and less invasive would be unethical and inappropriate." British Medical Association Guidelines Circumcision of Males Infants Guidance for Doctors (1996)

"We do not support the removal of a normal part of the body, unless there are definite indications to justify the complications and risks which may arise. In particular, we are opposed to male children being subjected to a procedure, which had they been old enough to consider the advantages and disadvantages, may well have opted to reject the operation and retain their prepuce." Australasian Association of Paediatric Surgeons (1996)

"If I had had my baby circumcised and then seen the video, I think I would have gone crazy." Private communication from a woman who divorced her circumcised husband and got custody of their baby son because her husband, after seeing a baby being circumcised on the NOCIRC Circumcision Video, insisted that their baby son be circumcised anyway.

"What incomprehensible force brought me from this beautiful, untraumatized birth at home to a strange doctor's office one week later sitting there frightened and reluctant, holding my sleeping, peaceful, trusting newborn infant? ... The trauma and torture inflicted upon this tiny, helpless little being were to come back and haunt me again and again." Rosemary Romberg, "Circumcision: My Own Story"

"If I stop doing this work for a single second, I start hearing babies screaming -- and they're my babies." Marilyn Milos, RN, Director, NOCIRC

"Shouldn't organ donation remain within the realm of consenting adults and the dead?" D.C. McKnight (NOCIRC of Iowa/ Ankeny)

"Noncircumcised males are the 'genital chic.'
If your foreskin is gone, you are now up the creek.
It's a great work of art like the statue of Venus,
If you're wearing a hat on the head of your penis."
From "Ode to the Circumcised Male," by Edgar J. Schoen, MD, Chairman, American Academy of Pediatrics 1989 Task Force on Circumcision, American Journal of Diseases in Children, Feb. 1987; Vol 141: 128 [Dr. Schoen's entire poem can be found on the Internet at: http://www.cirp.org/CIRP/literature/schoen-ode.]

"The foreskin is disgusting." Talmud, Nearim 31 B

"Every male among you shall be circumcised on the eighth day, both those born in your house and any not of your blood but bought with your money." Genesis 17

"Brit milah is the longest experiment in history that has never been analyzed properly." Unidentified Jewish doctor quoted in "Keeping the Faith," Jewish Chronicle (London), 2/23/96, p. 28

"I'm Jewish ... but ... after hearing all this ... and seeing that tape ... to see a baby cry like that, forget it." Woman in the audience of the Donahue Show, 6/17/87

"[C]ertainty is probably the worst thing for the human soul imaginable. That was the failure of fascism and communism and socialism -- people who had an ideology to which they were so committed that there was no margin of error ... to be so certain about any of the dogmas or doctrines that one is ready to kill, perform fanatical acts, even suicide -- that's bad for the human soul." Rabbi Emanuel Rachman, Chancellor of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, L'Chayim, Jewish Education in Media, 7/10/95

"The right to practice one's religion ends at the epidermis of another human being." Wayne Hampton, Sunnyvale, CA

"Nothing is too sacred to be understood." Author unknown

"Without nerve endings, one cannot feel -- much as without eyes, one cannot see." Fran P. Hosken, STOP Female Genital Mutilation / WOMEN SPEAK / Facts and Actions (WIN, 1995)

"We are not sexually communicating the right way. People are not fucking enough, and they are not fucking the right way. The women aren't getting off and neither are the men ... We have so much violence because we don't have good sex." Oliver Stone, interview with Mondo 2000 magazine, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, 2/2/98

"Hospitals like bad doctors because they make money for the hospital." Private communication from an MD

"I have the greatest admiration for those men who, circumcised themselves, have the courage not to circumcise their sons." George C. Denniston, MD, Founder of D.O.C. (Doctors Opposing Circumcision)

"I would die before I would assist with another circumcision." Mary Conant, RN, one of the Santa Fe Conscientious Objectors to Circumcision Nurses and co-founder of Nurses for the Rights of the Child (quoted), Albuquerque Journal North, 6/13/95

"I agree with your position." Thomas S. Szasz, MD, Closing address, Third International Symposium on Circumcision University of Maryland, May 22-25, 1994

"Do you really want your son to 'lack' like Daddy?" NOCIRC of Michigan Informant, May 1997

"The infant [Prince William] was tagged Baby Wales and breastfed by his mother, who was adamant that he should not be circumcized like his father." Diana In Private: The Princess Nobody Knows, by Lady Colin Campbell (NY: St. Martins Press, 1992)

"Ten out of ten babies prefer not to be circumcised." Jody McLaughlin, Editor, The Compleat Mother

"We've got to stop imprinting violence on the nervous system." Eileen Marie Wayne, MD

"I thank my grandma for doing what she's doing because if she didn't know what it was about, I might be like a whole bunch of you men out there." Matthew Orlando, 10, grandson of Marilyn Milos, RN, founder and director of NOCIRC, NOHARMM Rally at the California Medical Association, July 12, 1993

"It's good to be headless." Warrior in Chinese mythology, after losing his head in battle.

"Through lack of understanding they remained sane." George Orwell, 1984

"There is nothing more tragic in life that the utter impossibility of changing what you have done." John Galsworthy

"The most tragic words in any language are 'too late.'" Author unknown

"If the facts presented in this book are not sufficient to convince some readers that circumcision should be abolished, I can only say that there exist among us some hopeless people whose mentality is so paralyzed by the narcotic of religion that nothing can arouse it from its state of lethargy. But to the others, to those who have some regard for mankind, who believe that innocent and helpless children should be defended and protected from the savage brutality and cruel mutilation of circumcision, then to them I cry, with all the power and strength that I possess, with all the vehemence at my command, and from the deepest recesses of my heart, Stop, in the name of Humanity, Stop!" Joseph Lewis, In the Name of Humanity (NY: Freethought Press, 1967)

"Humanity has faced many hurdles during its long, ongoing evolution from superstition and tyranny to enlightenment and freedom. The hurdle of sexual mutilation, though daunting, can be overcome. The contributors to this volume bring their unique talents and perspectives on the global problem of sexual mutilation and suggest strategies for safeguarding the world's children and the adults they will become from these human rights violations. Despite the disturbing picture of human frailty and error they reveal, they share fascinating insights into the human condition and give hope for future progress." Sexual Mutilations: A Human Tragedy, Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Sexual Mutilations, August 9-11, 1996, Lausanne, Switzerland

"Most parents who see what's actually done to a baby when he's circumcised and how he reacts decide against this contraindicated surgery and keep their baby intact." Marilyn F. Milos, RN, Founder/Director, NOCIRC

"If circumcision is too horrible for parents to see, surely it's too horrible for babies to experience." Rosemary Romberg, author of Circumcision: The Painful Dilemma

"Male circumcision is the most violent act that one can perpetrate against an innocent victim with absolute impunity in the USA and most of the world." Ari Zighelboim

"Cyberwords can expose the denied repressed shadow circumcisers compulsively act out, but only laws will stop them." Eileen Marie Wayne, MD

"Now, more than ever, it is imperative that the First World countries acknowledge responsibility for their own form of genital mutilation, namely, the circumcision of newborn boys. In the so-called Joan/John case, headlined in the television and print media in 1997, it was circumcision by electric cautery that burned off the entire penis down to the pubic bone." John Money, MD, Professor of Pediatrics Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University Excerpt, personal correspondence to Hanny Lightfoot-Klein (To be used as the opening statement for her chapter on male circumcision in the upcoming revision to her book, Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey Into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa)

"Forced and coerced genital cutting is an especially violent means of control and domination -- and itself marks a society as violent." Victory to the Children: Ending Circumcision in the Next Century -- Marilyn Fayre Milos, RN

"The creations of our minds should be a blessing not a curse to mankind." Albert Einstein

"The whole of anything is never told." Henry James