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Quotes by Margaret Mead


A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
– Margaret Mead
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
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
– Margaret Mead
And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.
– Margaret Mead
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
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.
– Margaret Mead
Because of their agelong training in human relations-for that is what feminine intuition really is-women have a special contribution to make to any group enterprise.
– Margaret Mead
Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.
– Margaret Mead
Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.
– Margaret Mead
Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.
– Margaret Mead
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.
– Margaret Mead
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
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
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.
– Margaret Mead
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
Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
– Margaret Mead
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.
– Margaret Mead
It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
– Margaret Mead
Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.
– Margaret Mead
Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.
– Margaret Mead
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.
– Margaret Mead
Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.
– Margaret Mead
One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.
– Margaret Mead
Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
– Margaret Mead
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.
– Margaret Mead
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.
– Margaret Mead
Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.
– Margaret Mead
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
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.
– Margaret Mead
The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.
– Margaret Mead
The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.
– Margaret Mead
To cherish the life of the world.
– Margaret Mead
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
We have nowhere else to go... this is all we have.
– Margaret Mead
We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
– Margaret Mead
What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.
– Margaret Mead
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
Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible.
– Margaret Mead
Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.
– Margaret Mead
Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.
– Margaret Mead
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.
– Margaret Mead
I learned the value of hard work by working hard.
– Margaret Mead
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
I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.
– Margaret Mead
Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.
– Margaret Mead
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
– Margaret Mead