Margaret Mead Quotes & Sayings

The atmosphere is the key symbol of global interdependence. — Margaret Mead

Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation. — Margaret Mead

I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples - faraway peoples - so that Americans might better understand themselves. — Margaret Mead

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

My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school. — Margaret Mead

I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had. — Margaret Mead

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

American society is very like a fish society ... Among certain species of fish, the only thing which determines order of dominance is length of time in the fishbowl. The oldest resident picks on the newest resident, and if the newest resident is removed to a new bowl, he, as oldest resident, will pick on the newcomers. — Margaret Mead

Any town that doesn't have sidewalks doesn't love its children. — Margaret Mead

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

You just have to learn not to care about the dusty mites under the beds. — Margaret Mead

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

I learned the value of hard work by working hard. — Margaret Mead

We must have ... a place where children can have a whole group of adults they can trust. — Margaret Mead

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

It is typical, in America, that a person's hometown is not the place where he is living now but is the place he left behind. — Margaret Mead

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

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

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

[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

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

Laughter, that distinctively human emotion, laughter which springs from trust in the other, from willingness to put oneself momentarily in the other's place, even at one's own expense, is the special emotional basis of democratic procedures, just as pride is the emotion of an aristocracy, shame of a crowd that rules, and fear of a police state. — Margaret Mead

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

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

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

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. — Margaret Mead

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. — Margaret Mead

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

Margaret Mead was both a student of civilization and an exemplar of it. To a public of millions, she brought the central insight of cultural anthropology: that varying cultural patterns express an underlying human unity. She mastered her discipline, but she also transcended it. Intrepid, independent, plain spoken, fearless, she remains a model for the young and a teacher from whom all may learn. — Margaret Mead

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

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

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

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

It is of very doubtful value to enlist the gifts of a woman into fields that have been defined as male; it frightens the men, unsexes the women, and muffles and distorts the contribution women could make. — Margaret Mead

Dancing is the only activity in which almost all ages and both sexes participate. — Margaret Mead

Because our civilization is woven of so many diverse strands, the ideas which any one group accepts will be found to contain numerous contradictions. — Margaret Mead

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

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

War is only an invention, not a biological necessity. — Margaret Mead

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

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

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

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded. — 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 people of one nation alone cannot save their own children; each holds the responsibility for the others' children. — Margaret Mead

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

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

The capacity for friendship usually goes with highly developed civilizations. The ability to cultivate people differs by culture and class; but on the whole, educated people have more ways to make friends ... In England, for instance, you find everyone in your class has read the same books. Here, people grope for something in common-like a newly engaged girl who came to me and said, It's absolutely wonderful! His uncle and my cousin were on the same football team. — Margaret Mead

If sports are the toy department of life, then the NFL is the FAO Schwartz of sports. — Margaret Mead

There are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing. — Margaret Mead

I did not write it [Coming of Age in Samoa] as a popular book, but only with the hope that it would be intelligible to those who might make the best use of its theme, that adolescence need not be the time of stress and strain which Western society made it; that growing up could be freer and easier and less complicated; and also that there were prices to pay for the very lack of complication I found in Samoa - less intensity, less individuality, less involvement with life. — Margaret Mead

The assumption that men and woman are essentially alike in all respects, or even in the most important ones, is a damaging one, as damaging as the assumption that they are different in ways in which they aren't different, perhaps more so ... — Margaret Mead

Warfare ... is just an invention, older and more widespread than the jury system, but none the less an invention. — Margaret Mead

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

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

The ability to learn is older as it is also more widespread than is the ability to teach. — Margaret Mead

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive. — Margaret Mead

In contrast to our own social environment which brings out different aspects of human nature and often demonstrated that behavior which occurs almost invariably in individuals within our society is nevertheless due not to original nature but to social environment; and a homogeneous and simple development of the individual may be studied. — Margaret Mead

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

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

Throughout history, females have picked providers for males. Males pick anything. — Margaret Mead

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation. — 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

The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations. — 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

Leisure and the cultivation of human capacities are inextricably interdependent. — Margaret Mead

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. — Margaret Mead

Women have an important contribution to make. — Margaret Mead

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

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 ... — Margaret Mead

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

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

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. — Margaret Mead

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

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

Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young. — Margaret Mead

[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

I think rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature. — Margaret Mead

Today's children are the first generation to grow up in a world that has the power to destroy itself. — Margaret Mead

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

Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible. — Margaret Mead

When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed. — Margaret Mead

For art to be reality, the whole sensuous being must be caught up in the experience. — Margaret Mead

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate. — Margaret Mead

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

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. — Margaret Mead

I'm unique just like everyone else — Margaret Mead

Mourning has become unfashionable in the United States. The bereaved are supposed to pull themselves together as quickly as possible and to reweave the torn fabric of life ... we do not allow ... for the weeks and months during which a loss is realized - a beautiful word that suggests the transmutation of the strange into something that is one's own. — Margaret Mead

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

Keeping even the most humble talent wrapped in a napkin becomes the more reprehensible the greater the emergency. — Margaret Mead

The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it alone — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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