Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Humanity, Behavior, Manners
The liberals have not softened their view of actuality to make themselves live closer to the dream, but instead sharpen their perceptions and fight to make the dream actuality or give up the battle in despair.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Liberalism
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
Topics: Information, Learning
Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Sex
Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: One liners, Father
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
Topics: Independence
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
Topics: Helpfulness, Success
One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Relationships, Humanity, Humankind
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
Topics: Purpose, Achievement
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
Topics: Manners
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
Topics: Hell
Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.
—Margaret Mead
Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Women
We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Wildlife
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.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Housework
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
Topics: Family
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.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Cities, City Life
Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.
—Margaret Mead
Sooner or later I’m going to die, but I’m not going to retire.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Retirement
Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Children
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Teamwork, Courage, People, Zen, Wildlife, Action, Growth, Kindness, Doubt, Change
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
Topics: Envy, Happiness, Jealousy
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
Topics: Science
For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Media
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
Topics: City Life, Cities
No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Family
I’ve been married three times—and each time I married the right person.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Marriage
If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Age, Aging
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
Topics: Prayer
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
Topics: Education
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Carlos Castaneda Peruvian-born American Anthropologist
- Stephen Jay Gould American Paleontologist
- Erica Jong American Novelist, Poet
- William Graham Sumner American Polymath
- Francine du Plessix Gray American Writer, Literary Critic
- M. Scott Peck American Psychiatrist
- Buckminster Fuller American Inventor, Philosopher
- Joan Rivers American Entertainer
- William Safire American Columnist, Editor
- Bill Cosby American Actor
Leave a Reply