Best Margaret Mead Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

EARTH DAY reminds the people of the world of the need for continuing care which is vital to Earth's safety. — 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

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

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

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

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

Home, I learned, can be anywhere you make it. Home is also the place to which you come back again and again. — Margaret Mead

Female animals defending their young are notoriously ferocious and lack the playful delight in combat which characterizes the mock combats of males of the same species. There seems very little ground for claiming that the mother of young children is more peaceful, more responsible, and more thoughtful for the welfare of the human race than is her husband or brother. — Margaret Mead

The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded. — 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

The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature. — Margaret Mead

In all cultures, human beings - in order to be human - must understand the nonhuman. — Margaret Mead

I don't consider my marriages as failures! It's idiotic to assume that because a marriage ends, it's failed. — 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

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. — Margaret Mead

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. — 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

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

All of us who grew up before World War II are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before. — Margaret Mead

The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social. — 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

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

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

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

Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention. — Margaret Mead

I discovered when I had a child of my own that I had become a biased observer of small children. Instead of looking at them with affectionate but nonpartisan eyes, I saw each of them as older or younger, bigger or smaller, more or less graceful, intelligent, or skilled than my own child. — Margaret Mead

Up to a few years ago nearly all the literature about Oceania was written by papalagi and other outsiders. Our islands were and still are a goldmine for romantic novelists and filmmakers, bar-room journalists and semi-literate tourists, sociologists and Ph.D. students, remittance men and sailing evangelists, UNO experts, and colonial administrators and their well-groomed spouses. Much of this literature ranges from the hilariously romantic through the pseudo-scholarly to the infuriatingly racist; from the noble savage literary school through Margaret Mead and all her comings of age, Somerset Maugham's puritan missionaries/drunks/and saintly whores and James Michener's rascals and golden people, to the stereotyped childlike pagan who needs to be steered to the Light. — Albert Wendt

[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

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

?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. — Margaret Mead