Margaret Mead Quotes (80 Quotes)

Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.

We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.

The natives are superficially agreeable, but they go in for cannibalism, headhunting, infanticide, incest, avoidance and joking relationships, and biting lice in half with their teeth

If I were to be taken hostage, I would not plead for release nor would I want my government to be blackmailed. I think certain government officials, industrialists and celebrated persons should make it clear they are prepared to be sacrificed if taken hostage. If that were done, what gain would there be for terrorists in taking hostages

Each home has been reduced to the bare essentials -- to barer essentials than most primitive people would consider possible. Only one woman's hands to feed the baby, answer the telephone, turn off the gas under the pot that is boiling over, soothe the older child who has broken a toy, and open both doors at once. She is a nutritionist, a child psychologist, an engineer, a production manager, an expert buyer, all in one. Her husband sees her as free to plan her own time, and envies her she sees him as having regular hours and envies him.

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.

WE MUST DEVISE A SYSTEM IN WHICH PEACE IS MORE REWARDING THAN WAR.

The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates. Not only does he picture us caught in a tremendous man-made or God-made trap from which there is no escape, but we must also listen to him day in, day out, describe how the trap is inexorably closing. To such prophecies the human race, as presently bred and educated and situated, is incapable of listening. So some dance and some immolate themselves as human torches some take drugs and some artists spill their creativity in sets of randomly placed dots on a white ground.

Our treatment of both older people and children reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, ''Go to sleep by yourselves.'' And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.

If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

We need every human gift and cannot afford to neglect any gift because of artificial barriers of sex or race or class or national origin.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Some veil between childhood and the present is necessary. If the veil is withdrawn, the artistic imagination sickens and dies, the prophet looks in the mirror with a disillusioned and cynical sneer, the scientist goes fishing.

People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.

As Significant as the Invention of Drama or the Novel.

Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, businessman or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts, and varying interests.

We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.

I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.

The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.

Mothers are a biological necessity fathers are a social invention.

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.

The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it alone

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.

The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer.

We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.

Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.

Pigs and cows and chickens and people are all competing for grain.

Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.

Because of their age long training in human relations for that is what feminine intuition really is women have a special contribution to make any group enterprise

We have nowhere else to go... this is all we have.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate lovingly, our own.

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.

Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.

And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.

I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman. And as I had my father's kind of mind-which was also his mother's-I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.

Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world indeed, it's the only thing that ever does