Margaret Mead Quotes

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

Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.

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

People are still encouraged to marry as if they could count on marriage being for life, and at the same time they are absorbing a knowledge of the great frequency of divorce.

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

Pigs and cows and chickens and people are all competing for grain.

The negative cautions of science are never popular.

Women have an important contribution to make.

From a hundred cultures, [there is] one culture which does what no culture has ever done before-gives a place to every human gift.

The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society.

In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present.

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.

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

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.

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

Never underestimate that a small group of people can hold up a liquor license. Sometimes, it's the only thing that can.

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.

In our contemporary world, no one can think or work with a single picture of what a family is. No one can fit all human behavior, all thought and feeling, into a single pattern.

Cynicism is the other thing that goes with sentimentality.

When I stand on a street in a Canadian city and look across the street, it couldn't be anywhere but Canada, but how can I prove it?

We women are doing pretty well. We're almost back to where we were in the twenties.

I devoutly believe that there is no difficulty between two people for which both are not responsible.

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

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

We must bear in mind the possibility that the greater opportunities open in the twentieth century to women may be quite withdrawn, and that we may return to stricter regimentation of women.

I learned to observe the world around me, and to note what I saw

Photographs [are] of course heavily dependent upon the culture, the disciplinary point of view and the idiosyncratic vision of the particular photographer-analyst.

Envy of the male role can come as much from an undervaluation of the role of wife and mother as from an overvaluation of the public aspects of achievement that have been reserved for men.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal an get away with it.

Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need.

When I stand on a street in a Canadian city and look across the street it couldn't be anywhere but Canada but how can I prove it?

No matter how many communes anybody invents the family always creeps back.

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

Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.

In almost any society I think the quality of the non-conformists is like to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

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

Anthropology demands 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.

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.

Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.