Margaret Mead Quotes

I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman.

I was a child that both my parents wanted. I was told from the time I was born that I was totally satisfactory. I had a chance to be what I wanted to be.

Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.

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.

Leisure and the cultivation of human capacities are inextricably interdependent.

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.

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

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

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

I think rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature.

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

We are at a point in history where a proper attention to space, and especially near space, may be absolutely crucial in bringing the world together.

An education not founded on Art will never succeed.

the people of one nation alone cannot save their own children; each holds the responsibility for the others' children.

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

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

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.

All social change comes from the passion of individuals.

Learned behaviors have replaced the biologically given ones.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Men have always been afraid that women could get along without them.

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.

Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.

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

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

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

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

In almost any society I think, the quality of the nonconformists is likely to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

One characteristic of Americans is that they have no toleration at all of anybody putting up with anything. We believe that whatever is going wrong ought to be fixed.

If man has not found ways to deal with environmental problems such as water and air pollution by 1998, it will be too late. The future is not determined and it lies in our own hands.

Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention

War is only an invention, not a biological necessity.

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

It has been a woman's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope.

Britons put up with, Americans fix, Canadians cope

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

In this country, some people start being miserable about growing old while they are still young.

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

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.

No one will live all his life in the world into which he was born and no one will die in the world in which he worked in his maturity.

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

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.

[Partly as a consequence of male authority] prestige value always attaches to the activities of men.

today's children are the first generation to grow up in a world that has the power to destroy itself.

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