Life's Pleasures Quote by Phyllis Schlafly

“Big Brother is on the march” is Schlafly at her most efficient: she doesn’t argue first, she brands. By yoking a policy proposal to Orwell’s surveillance state, she turns “mental health screening” from a bureaucratic public-health tool into a marching army. The verb choice matters. “On the march” evokes inevitability and force, suggesting citizens won’t be persuaded so much as processed. It’s a call to defensive action, not a request for deliberation.

The subtext is a familiar Schlafly triangulation: state power, parental authority, and corporate profit. “All children” is the pressure point. Universal programs sound egalitarian, but she frames universality as overreach, especially when the subjects are kids and the implied target is the family’s autonomy. The line “subject all children” casts children as objects of experiment, not people being helped. That moral inversion is the engine of the quote.

Then comes the pivot from government to market: “the pharmaceuticals are gearing up.” Schlafly doesn’t need evidence in the sentence; insinuation does the work. She pairs the language of care (“mental health”) with the language of commerce (“bigger sales”), implying that diagnoses will be manufactured to create consumers. It’s anti-elite populism with a scalpel: experts, schools, clinicians, and drug companies collapse into one self-serving apparatus.

Contextually, this sits in late-20th/early-21st-century conservative backlash to expanding institutional roles in education and health, alongside rising diagnoses (ADHD, depression) and culture-war anxieties about medicating childhood. Schlafly’s intent isn’t to parse clinical nuances; it’s to make suspicion feel like common sense, and to recruit parents as the last line of resistance.