Margaret mead quotes

Jealousy is not a barometer by which the depth of love can be read. It merely records the degree of the lover's insecurity.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Loving you is just like breathing, as effortless, and as lovely.

Sometimes, instead of helping people to advance, a discovery or an invention holds them back.

Earth Day is the first holy day...and is devoted to the harmony of nature... The celebration offends no historical calendar, yet it transcends them all.

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

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

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

I have been accused of having believed when I wrote Sex and Temperament that there are no sex differences... This, many readers felt, was too much. It was too pretty. I must have found what I was looking for. But this misconception comes from a lack of understanding of what anthropology means, of 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.

Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man

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

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

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

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.

No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation... We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have... We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.

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.

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

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.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

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.

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 have...a place where children can have a whole group of adults they can trust.

Even very recently, the elders could say: 'You know, I have been young and you never have been old.' But today's young people can reply: 'You never have been young in the world I am young in, and you never can be.' ... the older generation will never see repeated in the lives of young people their own unprecedented experience of sequentially emerging change. This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.

The need to find meaning...is as real as the need for trust and for love, for relations with other human beings.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist-this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul-a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.

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.

There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a postmenopausal woman.

Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we've lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it's the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes.

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

It used to be when we said, ''til death do us part,' death parted us pretty soon. That's why marriages used to last forever. Everybody was dead.

The atmosphere is the key symbol of global interdependence.

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.

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

For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections.

I think rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature.

Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.

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.

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.

Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one. Where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.

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.

We need every human gift and cannot afford to neglect any gift because of artificial barriers of sex or race or class or national origin.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

We grow up never questioning that which is unquestioned around us.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

there are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing.

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.

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.

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

human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.

Be who you really are, do what you want to do, in order to have what you really want.

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

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

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?

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

Don't depend on governments or corporations to fix problems. Social revolutions are led by passionate individuals and that's what makes the difference.

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.

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

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

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.

If they learn easily, they are penalized for being bored when they have nothing to do; if they excel in some outstanding way, they are penalized as being conspicuously better than the peer group. The culture tries to make the child with a gift into a one-sided person, to penalize him at every turn, to cause him trouble in making friends and to create conditions conducive to the development of a neurosis. Neither teachers, the parents of other children, nor the child peers will tolerate a Wunderkind.

Humanity . . . lies in man's capacity to question the known and imagine the unknown.

‎ 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.

Dear Math, please grow up and solve your own problems. I'm tired of solving them for you. Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

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.

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

Anthropology... has always been highly dependent upon photography... As the use of still photography - and moving pictures - has become increasingly essential as a part of anthropological methods, the need for photographers with a disciplined knowledge of anthropology and for anthropologists with training in photography has increased. We expect that in the near future sophisticated training in photography will be a requirement for all anthropologists. (1962)

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

If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.

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.

where families suffer from disasters that are preventable, this is a measure of a whole nation's neglect. A society imperils its own future when, out of negligence or contempt, it overlooks the need of children to be reared in a family ... or when, in the midst of plenty, some families cannot give their children adequate food and shelter, safe activity and rest, and an opportunity to grow into full adulthood as people who can care for and cherish other human beings like themselves.

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.

In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.

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

...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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.

Those social behaviors which automatically preclude the building of a democratic world must go - every social limitation of human beings in terms of heredity, whether it be of race, or sex, or class. Every social institution which teaches human beings to cringe to those above and step on those below must be replaced by institutions which teach people to look each other straight in the face.

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

Many people are shrinking from the future and from participation in the movement toward a new, expanded reality. And, like homesick travelers abroad, they are focusing their anxieties on home. The reasons are not far to seek. We are at a turning point in human history. . . . We could turn our attention to the problems that going to the Moon certainly will not solve ... But I think this would be fatal to our future. . . . A society that no longer moves forward does not merely stagnate; it begins to die.

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

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

The closest friends I made all through life have been people who also grew up close to a loved and loving grandmother or grandfather.

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

Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups or between groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to be run. If you look back, you will see that warfare was an invention, just as ways of handling government or taxes are inventions. You will see, too, that once people use an invention they go on using it until they find another which they think is superior.

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.

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

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.