Margaret Mead Quotations

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

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to cooperate

...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.

we came to realize that a civilization which rode roughshod over the way of life of other peoples was incorporating evil in its own way of life.

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

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

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

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

As Significant as the Invention of Drama or the Novel.

Monogamous heterosexual love is probably one of the most difficult, complex and demanding of human relationships.

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.

Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.

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.

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.

We — mankind — stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device — our consciousness of the crisis — as our unique contribution.

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

Injustice experienced in the flesh, in deeply wounded flesh, is the stuff out of which change explodes.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

A small group of thoughtful people could change 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.

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.

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.

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.

Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.

[Partly as a consequence of male authority] prestige value always attaches to the activities of men.

Between friends there is no bribery. ... the relationship of friends is intrinsically fair and equal. Neither feels stronger or more clever or more beautiful than the other.

To demand that another love what one loves is tyranny enough, but to demand that another hate what one hates, is even worse.

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.

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.

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.

The time has come, I think, when we must recognize bisexuality as a normal form of human behavior.

Everybody's suffering is mine but not everybody's murdering ... I do not distinguish for one moment whether my child is in danger or a child in central Asia. But I will not accept responsibility for what other people do because I happen to belong to that nation or that race or that religion. I do not believe in guilt by association.

Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.

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.

Our human situation no longer permits us to make armed dichotomies between those who are good and those who are evil, those who are right and those who are wrong. The first blow dealt to the enemy's children will sign the death warrant of our own.

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.

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.

There are unidentified flying objects. That is, there are a hard core of cases-perhaps 20 to 30 percent in different studies-for which there is no explanation. We can only imagine what purpose lies behind the activities of these quiet, harmlessly cruising objects that time and again approach the Earth. The most likely explanation, it seems to me, is that they are simply watching what we are up to

in all cultures, human beings - in order to be human - must understand the nonhuman.

‎ When a person is born we rejoice, and when they're married we jubilate, but when they die we try to pretend nothing has happened.

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.

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.

We are at a point in history where a proper attention to space, and especially near space, may be absolutely crucial in bringing the world together.

Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.

Human beings do not carry civilization in their genes. All that we do carry in our genes are certain capacities- the capacity to learn to walk upright, to use our brains, to speak, to relate to our fellow men, to construct and use tools, to explore the universe, and to express that exploration in religion, in art, in science, in philosophy.

You know you love someone when you cannot put into words how they make you feel.

There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing...when we save our children, we save ourselves

Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.

The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown... The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers.

It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.

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.

I was a child that both my parents wanted. I was told from the time I was born that I was totally satisfactory. I had a chance to be what I wanted to be.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it.

Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space.

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.

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?

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.

My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.

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