Top 100 Margaret Mead Quotes
#1. Whatever advantages may have arisen, in the past, out of the existence of a specially favored and highly privileged aristocracy, it is clear to me that today no argument can stand that supports unequal opportunity or any intrinsic disqualification for sharing in the whole of life.
Margaret Mead
#2. Envy of the male role can come as much from an undervaluation of the role of wife and mother as from an overvaluation of the public aspects of achievement that have been reserved for men.
Margaret Mead
#3. There is no lonelier person than the one who lives with a spouse with whom he or she cannot communicate.
Margaret Mead
#4. If man has not found ways to deal with environmental problems such as water and air pollution by 1998, it will be too late. The future is not determined and it lies in our own hands.
Margaret Mead
#5. 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.
Margaret Mead
#6. The experience of having brothers and sisters, born of the same parents, sleeping under the same roof, eating at the same table, is an inescapable, delightful and repelling, desired and abhorred part of each child's life.
Margaret Mead
#7. Of course we need children! Adults need children in their lives to listen to and care for, to keep their imagination fresh and their hearts young and to make the future a reality for which they are willing to work.
Margaret Mead
#8. Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
Margaret Mead
#9. 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
Margaret Mead
#10. Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention
Margaret Mead
#11. There are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing.
Margaret Mead
#12. One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal an get away with it.
Margaret Mead
#13. The Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes that women need more initiating, more time for maturing of sexual feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blunderer.
Margaret Mead
#14. It has been a woman's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope.
Margaret Mead
#15. 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.
Margaret Mead
#16. I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don't agree with or like.
Margaret Mead
#17. The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.
Margaret Mead
#18. One characteristic of Americans is that they have no toleration at all of anybody putting up with anything. We believe that whatever is going wrong ought to be fixed.
Margaret Mead
#19. When I stand on a street in a Canadian city and look across the street, it couldn't be anywhere but Canada, but how can I prove it?
Margaret Mead
#20. The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society.
Margaret Mead
#21. Interest and proficiency in almost any one activity-swimming, boating, fishing, skiing, skating-breed interest in many more. Once someone discovers the delight of mastering one skill, however slightly, he is likely to try out not just one more, but a whole ensemble.
Margaret Mead
#22. 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.
Margaret Mead
#23. You can no longer save your family, tribe or nation. You can only save the whole world.
Margaret Mead
#24. [Among the Arapeh ... both father and mother are held responsible for child care by the entire community ... ] If one comments upon a middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer: 'Good-looking? Ye-e-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all those children'.
Margaret Mead
#25. I am interested in what happens to people who find the whole of life so rewarding that they are able to move through it with the same kind of delight in which a child moves through a game.
Margaret Mead
#26. 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.
Margaret Mead
#27. A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.
Margaret Mead
#28. It is not until science has become a discipline to which the research ability of any mind from any class in society can be attracted that it can become rigorously scientific.
Margaret Mead
#29. To the extent a person makes, invents or thinks something that is new to him, he may be said to have performed a creative act.
Margaret Mead
#30. The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates.
Margaret Mead
#31. Living in the modern world, clothed and muffled, forced to convey our sense of our bodies in terms of remote symbols like walking sticks and umbrellas and handbags, it is easy to lose sight of the immediacy of the human body plan.
Margaret Mead
#32. The closest friends I made all through life have been people who also grew up close to a loved and loving grandmother or grandfather.
Margaret Mead
#33. I approached the idea of college with the expectation of taking part in an intellectual feast ... In college, in some way that I devoutly believed in but could not explain, I expected to become a person.
Margaret Mead
#34. 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.
Margaret Mead
#35. As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period when this was not so. We know of no people who have succeeded for long in dissolving the family or displacing it.
Margaret Mead
#36. Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.
Margaret Mead
#37. We end up with the contradictory picture of a society that appears to throw its doors wide open to women, but translates her every step towards success as having been damaging.
Margaret Mead
#38. I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.
Margaret Mead
#39. Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention.
Margaret Mead
#41. Grandparents are given a second chance to enjoy parenthood with fewer of its tribulations and anxieties.
Margaret Mead
#42. 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.
Margaret Mead
#43. To demand that another love what one loves is tyranny enough, but to demand that another hate what one hates, is even worse.
Margaret Mead
#44. We must have ... a place where children can have a whole group of adults they can trust.
Margaret Mead
#45. WE MUST DEVISE A SYSTEM IN WHICH PEACE IS MORE REWARDING THAN WAR.
Margaret Mead
#46. Most people prefer to carry out the kinds of experiments that allow the scientist to feel that he is in full control of the situation rather than surrendering himself to the situation, as one must in studying human beings as they actually live.
Margaret Mead
#47. People are still encouraged to marry as if they could count on marriage being for life, and at the same time they are absorbing a knowledge of the great frequency of divorce.
Margaret Mead
#48. The task of each family is also the task of all humanity. This is to cherish the living, remember those who have gone before, and prepare for those who are not yet born.
Margaret Mead
#49. Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.
Margaret Mead
#50. Sometimes, instead of helping people to advance, a discovery or an invention holds them back.
Margaret Mead
#51. 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.
Margaret Mead
#52. Just as the difference in height between males is no longer a realistic issue, now that lawsuits have been substituted for hand-to-hand encounters, so the difference in strength between men and women is no longer worth elaboration in cultural institutions.
Margaret Mead
#53. The notion that we are products of our environment is our greatest sin; we are products of our choices.
Margaret Mead
(this may not be her exact wording, but it's close enough).
Margaret Mead
#54. Samoa culture demonstrates how much the tragic or the easy solution of the Oedipus situation depends upon the inter-relationship between parents and children, and is not created out of whole cloth by the young child's biological impulses.
Margaret Mead
#55. The time has come, I think, when we must recognize bisexuality as a normal form of human behavior.
Margaret Mead
#56. We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.
Margaret Mead
#57. Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need.
Margaret Mead
#58. I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had.
Margaret Mead
#59. Recognize and respect Earth's beautiful systems of balance, between the presence of animals on land, the fish in the sea, birds in the air, mankind, water, air, and land. Most importantly there must always be awareness of the actions by people that can disturb this precious balance.
Margaret Mead
#60. Somehow, we have to get older people back close to growing children if we are to restore a sense of community, acquire knowledge of the past, and provide a sense of the future.
Margaret Mead
#61. Creationism: the theory that Rome was built in a day.
Margaret Mead
#62. Loving you is just like breathing, as effortless, and as lovely.
Margaret Mead
#63. In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present.
Margaret Mead
#64. [Mead described the Arapesh as a culture in which both sexes were] placid and contented, unaggressive and noninitiatory, noncompetitive and responsive, warm, docile, and trusting.
Margaret Mead
#65. Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.
Margaret Mead
#66. Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.
Margaret Mead
#67. I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?
Margaret Mead
#68. You are totally unique. Just like everyone else.
Margaret Mead
#69. If we are to give our utmost effort and skill and enthusiasm, we must believe in ourselves, which means believing in our past and in our future, in our parents and in our children, in that particular blend of moral purpose and practical inventiveness which is the American character.
Margaret Mead
#70. In each age there is a series of pressing questions which must be asked and answered. On the correctness of the questions depends the survival of those who ask; on the quality of the answers depends the quality of the life those survivors will lead.
Margaret Mead
#71. Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.
Margaret Mead
#72. I discovered when I had a child of my own that I had become a biased observer of small children. Instead of looking at them with affectionate but nonpartisan eyes, I saw each of them as older or younger, bigger or smaller, more or less graceful, intelligent, or skilled than my own child.
Margaret Mead
#73. No one will live all his life in the world into which he was born and no one will die in the world in which he worked in his maturity.
Margaret Mead
#74. Keeping even the most humble talent wrapped in a napkin becomes the more reprehensible the greater the emergency.
Margaret Mead
#75. Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Margaret Mead
#76. There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing ... when we save our children, we save ourselves
Margaret Mead
#77. I think rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature.
Margaret Mead
#78. I've been married three times - and each time I married the right person.
Margaret Mead
#79. In our contemporary world, no one can think or work with a single picture of what a family is. No one can fit all human behavior, all thought and feeling, into a single pattern.
Margaret Mead
#80. Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.
Margaret Mead
#81. Maleness in America is not absolutely defined; it has to be kept and re-earned every day, and one essential element in the definition is beating women in every game that both sexes play.
Margaret Mead
#82. The people of one nation alone cannot save their own children; each holds the responsibility for the others' children.
Margaret Mead
#83. For art to be reality, the whole sensuous being must be caught up in the experience.
Margaret Mead
#84. Men have always been afraid that women could get along without them.
Margaret Mead
#85. No country that permits firearms to be widely and randomly distributed among its population - especially firearms that are capable of wounding and killing human beings - can expect to escape violence, and a great deal of violence.
Margaret Mead
#86. EARTH DAY reminds the people of the world of the need for continuing care which is vital to Earth's safety.
Margaret Mead
#87. If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.
Margaret Mead
#88. From a hundred cultures, [there is] one culture which does what no culture has ever done before-gives a place to every human gift.
Margaret Mead
#89. Monogamous heterosexual love is probably one of the most difficult, complex and demanding of human relationships.
Margaret Mead
#90. Be who you really are, do what you want to do, in order to have what you really want.
Margaret Mead
#91. The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as - carried too far - one of its weaknesses.
Margaret Mead
#92. And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.
Margaret Mead
#93. The assumption that men were created equal, with an equal ability to make an effort and win an earthly reward, although denied every day by experience, is maintained every day by our folklore and our daydreams.
Margaret Mead
#94. Man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.
Margaret Mead
#95. 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.
Margaret Mead
#96. [Partly as a consequence of male authority] prestige value always attaches to the activities of men.
Margaret Mead
#97. Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression.
Margaret Mead
#98. In all cultures, human beings - in order to be human - must understand the nonhuman.
Margaret Mead
#99. 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.
Margaret Mead
#100. The older child who has lost or broken some valuable thing will be found when his parents return, not run away, not willing to confess, but in a deep sleep The thief whose case is being tried falls asleep
Margaret Mead
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