Selected Quotes by Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead- Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who was featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.
She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. She served as the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.
Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture. She was often seen as a controversial academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and the Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions.
Quotes by Margaret Mead:
“Never underestimate the power of a small, dedicated group of people to change the world; indeed, that is the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead, Life
“You are totally unique. Just like everyone else.”
Margaret Mead, Life
“I'm unique just like everyone else.”
Margaret Mead, Life
“What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”
Margaret Mead, Life
“It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.”
Margaret Mead, Life
“One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.”
Margaret Mead, Life
“The notion that we are products of our environment is our greatest sin; we are products of our choices."
Margaret Mead, Life
“Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.”
Margaret Mead, Life
“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, Life
“There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing...when we save our children, we save ourselves.”
Margaret Mead, Life
“Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need.”
Margaret Mead, Life
“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”
Margaret Mead, Life
“The significance of the dance in the education and socialisation of Samoan children is two-fold. In the first place it effectively offsets the rigorous subordination in which children are habitually kept. Here the admonitions of the elders change from "Sit down and keep still!" to "Stand up and dance!" The children are actually the centre of the group instead of its barely tolerated fringes.”
― Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation
Margaret Mead, Society
“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, Society
“Sisters is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.
Margaret Mead, Society
“An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift.”
Margaret Mead, Society
“We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.”
Margaret Mead, Society
“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.”
Margaret Mead, Society
“Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.”
Margaret Mead, Society
“For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.”
Margaret Mead, Society
“No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation. We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have. We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.”
Margaret Mead, Society, Technology
“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 gift will find a fitting place.”
Margaret Mead, Society, Goals
“Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.”
Margaret Mead, Society, Opportunities
“Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.”
Margaret Mead, Society, Government
“Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.”
Margaret Mead, Society, Government
“I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had.”
Margaret Mead, Intelligence/Wisdom
“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
― Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry
Margaret Mead, Intelligence/Wisdom
“We must turn all of our educational efforts to training our children for the choices which will confront them... The child who is to choose wisely must be healthy in mind and body. The children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
― Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation
Margaret Mead, Intelligence/Wisdom
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly , our own.”
Margaret Mead, Intelligence/Wisdom
“I learned to observe the world around me, and to note what I saw.”
Margaret Mead, Intelligence/Wisdom
“My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.”
Margaret Mead, Intelligence/Wisdom
“I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?”
Margaret Mead, Intelligence/Wisdom
“Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For indeed, that's all who ever have.”
Margaret Mead, Goals
“Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead, Goals
“A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.' - James Baldwin”
― Margaret Mead, A Rap on Race
Margaret Mead, Goals
“There is no reason to think a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens cannot change the world; Indeed, that's the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead, Goals
“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, Goals
“One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and not be held responsible.
― Margaret Mead, Cultural Factors in the Cause of Pathological Homicide. Bulletin of Menninger Clinic
Margaret Mead, Justice
“If you wish to know who is really the lover, look then not at the boy who sits by her side, looks boldly into her eyes and twists the flowers in her necklace around his fingers and steals the hibiscus flower from her hair that he may wear it behind his ear. Do not think it is he who whispers softly in her ear, or says to her 'Sweetheart, wait for me to-night. After the moon has set, I will come to you,' or who teases her by saying she has many lovers. Look instead at the boy who sits far-off, who sits with bent head and takes no part in the joking.
And you will see that in his eyes are always turned softly on the girl. Always he watches her and never does he miss a movement of her lips. Perhaps she will wink at him, perhaps she will raise her eyebrows, perhaps she will make a sign with her hand, he must always be wakeful and watchful or else he will miss it.”
Margaret Mead, Love
“You know you love someone when you cannot put into words how they make you feel.”
Margaret Mead, Love
“Too many people, when they reject God, go on believing in the devil. Many intellectuals have a sense of evil without a confidence in good.”
Margaret Mead, Belief
“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, Belief
“It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.”
Margaret Mead, Belief
“If we make one criterion for defining the artist the impulse to make something new, or to do something in a new way - a kind of divine discontent with all that has gone before, however good - then we can find such artists at every level of human culture, even when performing acts of great simplicity.”
Margaret Mead, Art
“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, Art, Belief, Music, Love
“Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible.”
Margaret Mead, Sex
“Women have an important contribution to make.”
Margaret Mead, Sex
“Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.”
Margaret Mead, Sex, Freedom
“I measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her fellow human beings.”
Margaret Mead, Success
“Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression.”