Quotes About Margaret Mead

#1. Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants.

John Cage

#2. The astounding energy of post-menopausal women (promised by Margaret Mead) is here, but the optimism to fuel it is not. The world seems ever more surely in the grip of materialism and surfaces. Image, image, image is all it sees. As an image, I'm definitely getting blurry.

Erica Jong

#3. 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

#4. Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.

Lily King

#5. Long ago, Margaret Mead, the world-famous anthropologist, noted that we should "never underestimate the power of a small group with dedication to change the world; it is, in fact, the only thing that does.

Michael J. Marquardt

#6. His favorite quote is from Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.

Emily Giffin

#7. Sisters is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship. ~Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead

#8. I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

Alan Furst

#9. Margaret Mead has said, Hell is always more convincing than Heaven.48

P.D. Smith

#10. 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

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

Margaret Mead

#12. 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

#13. There is no lonelier person than the one who lives with a spouse with whom he or she cannot communicate.

Margaret Mead

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

Margaret Mead

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

Margaret Mead

#18. If sports are the toy department of life, then the NFL is the FAO Schwartz of sports.

Margaret Mead

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

Margaret Mead

#22. 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

#23. Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention

Margaret Mead

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

Margaret Mead

#25. There are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing.

Margaret Mead

#26. Leisure and the cultivation of human capacities are inextricably interdependent.

Margaret Mead

#27. You just have to learn not to care about the dusty mites under the beds.

Margaret Mead

#28. Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.

Margaret Mead

#29. 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

#30. 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

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

Margaret Mead

#32. It has been a woman's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope.

Margaret Mead

#33. There is no reason to think a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens cannot change the world; Indeed, that's the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love.

Margaret Mead

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

Margaret Mead

#38. 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

#39. An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift

Margaret Mead

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. Where we choose to put our attention changes our brain, which in time can change how we see and interact with the world.

Margaret Mead

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. What we lack is not so much leisure to do as time to reflect and time to feel. What we seldom "take" is time to experience the things that have happened, the things that are happening, the things that are still ahead of us.

Margaret Mead

#46. You can no longer save your family, tribe or nation. You can only save the whole world.

Margaret Mead

#47. [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

#48. War is only an invention, not a biological necessity.

Margaret Mead

#49. 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

#50. Never underestimate that a small group of people can hold up a liquor license. Sometimes, it's the only thing that can.

Margaret Mead

#51. A society which is clamouring 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 to bear the conditions of choice.

Margaret Mead

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

Margaret Mead

#53. 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

#54. 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

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

Margaret Mead

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen.

Margaret Mead

#59. Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible.

Margaret Mead

#60. There is no evidence that suggests women are naturally better at caring for children ... with the fact of child-bearing out of the centre of attention, there is even more reason for treating girls first as human beings, then as women.

Margaret Mead

#61. The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates.

Margaret Mead

#62. Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly ...

Margaret Mead

#63. To the extent that either sex is disadvantaged, the whole culture is poorer, and the sex that, superficially, inherits the earth, inherits only a very partial legacy. The more whole the culture, the more whole each member, each man, each woman, each child will be.

Margaret Mead

#64. You can never have a relationship with someone whose smell you don't like.

Margaret Mead

#65. Blackberry winter, the time when the hoarforst lies on the blackberry blossoms; without this frost the berries will not set. It is the forerunner of a rich harvest.

Margaret Mead

#66. The most intractable problem today is not pollution or technology or war; but the lack of belief that the future is very much in the hands of the individual.

Margaret Mead

#67. An occupation that has no basis in sex-determined gifts can now recruit its ranks from twice as many potential artists.

Margaret Mead

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

Margaret Mead

#69. The problem with America today is that too many people know too much about not enough.

Margaret Mead

#70. 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

#71. Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.

Margaret Mead

#72. We must bear in mind the possibility that the greater opportunities open in the twentieth century to women may be quite withdrawn, and that we may return to stricter regimentation of women ...

Margaret Mead

#73. 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.

Margaret Mead

#74. An education not founded on Art will never succeed.

Margaret Mead

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

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

Margaret Mead

#81. 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

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

Margaret Mead

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

Margaret Mead

#84. I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.

Margaret Mead

#85. Through a grandmother's voice and hands the end of life is known at the beginning.

Margaret Mead

#86. Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention.

Margaret Mead

#87. The mind is not sex-typed.

Margaret Mead

#88. 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.

Margaret Mead

#89. There is no more creative force in the world than the menopausal woman with zest.

Margaret Mead

#90. Grandparents are given a second chance to enjoy parenthood with fewer of its tribulations and anxieties.

Margaret Mead

#91. 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 ...

Margaret Mead

#92. There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

Margaret Mead

#93. 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

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

Margaret Mead

#95. 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

#96. We must have ... a place where children can have a whole group of adults they can trust.

Margaret Mead

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

Margaret Mead

#98. 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

#99. What the world needs is not romantic lovers who are sufficient unto themselves, but husbands and wives who live in communities, relate to other people, carry on useful work and willingly give time and attention to their children.

Margaret Mead

#100. I had my father's mind, but he had his mother's mind. Fortunately, his mother lived with us and so I early realized that intellectual abilities of the kind I shared with my father and grandmother were not sex-linked.

Margaret Mead