Margaret Mead Quotes (80 Quotes)

Children not only have to learn what their parents learned in school, but also have to learn how to learn. This has to be recognized as a new problem which is only partly solved.

When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed.

To cherish the life of the world.

The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one's mind.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

It was not until we saw the picture of the earth, from the moon, that we realized how small and how helpless this planet is something that we must hold in our arms and care for.

Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

I've been married three times -- and each time I married the right person.

Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.

A society which is clamoring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable t.

Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.

Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.

We will be a better country when each religious group can trust its members to obey the dictates of their own religious faith without assistance from the legal structure of the country

The suffering of either sex -- of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult -- this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

The liberals have not softened their view of actuality to make themselves live closer to the dream, but instead sharpen their perceptions and fight to make the dream actuality or give up the battle in despair.

It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.

Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.

I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don't agree with or like.

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.