Ashley Montagu Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.

Ashley Montagu
The evidence indicates that woman is, on the whole, biologically superior to man.

Ashley Montagu
The main principle by which human beings must guide the future course of their development is love.

Ashley Montagu
You certainly can't tell anything from the microscopic structure of the brain whether the person was an idiot or a genius.

Ashley Montagu
The idea of "race" represents one of the most dangerous myths of our time.

Ashley Montagu
As the god of contemporary man's idolatry, science is a two-handed engine, and as such science is too important a human activity to leave to the scientist.

Ashley Montagu
The whole of life is a journey toward youthful old age, toward self-contemplation, love, gaiety, and, in a fundamental sense, the most gratifying time of our lives.... "Old age" should be a harvest time when the riches of life are reaped and enjoyed, while it continues to be a special period for self-development and expansion.

Ashley Montagu
The indications are that swearing preceded the development of cursing. That is, expletives, maledictions, exclamations, and imprecations of the immediately explosive or vituperative kind preceded the speechmaking and later rituals involved in the deliberate apportioning of the fate of an enemy. Swearing of the former variety is from the lips only, but the latter is from the heart. Damn it! is not that same as Damn you!

Ashley Montagu
An intelligence that is not humane is the most dangerous thing in the world.

Ashley Montagu
International law exists only in textbooks on international law.

Ashley Montagu
All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all living things whatsoever.

Ashley Montagu
The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health.

Ashley Montagu
The natural superiority of women is a biological fact, and a socially acknowledged reality.

Ashley Montagu
Circumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society.

Ashley Montagu
The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness.

Ashley Montagu
The world is so full of wonderful things we should all, if we were taught how to appreciate it, be far richer than kings.

Ashley Montagu
The sexes should not compete; they should cooperate and complement each other.

Ashley Montagu
It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.

Ashley Montagu
Human societies must be based on human relations first, and economic activities must be a function of human relations — not the other way round.

Ashley Montagu
Women are the carriers of the true spirit of humanity — the love of the mother for her child. The preservation of that kind of love is the true function of women. And let me, at this point, endeavor to make it quite clear why I mean the love of a mother for her child and not the love of an equal for an equal or any other kind of love.

Ashley Montagu
I consider the theme of this book to be a most important one, for I am convinced, and I hope the reader will agree, that good relations between the sexes are basic to the development of good human relations in all societies.

Ashley Montagu
Women are the bearers, the nurtures of life; men have more often tended to be the curtailers, the destroyers of life.

Ashley Montagu
Because women live creatively, they rarely experience the need to depict or write about that which to them is a primary experience and which men know only at a second remove. Women create naturally, men create artificially.

Ashley Montagu
Women are the mothers of humanity; do not let us ever forget that or underemphasize its importance. What mothers are to their children, so will man be to man.

Ashley Montagu
Bigotry and science can have no communication with each other, for science begins where bigotry and absolute certainty end. The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof. Let us never forget that tyranny most often springs from a fanatical faith in the absoluteness of one's beliefs.

Ashley Montagu
In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message.

Ashley Montagu
Today, while the titular head of the family may still be the father, everyone knows that he is little more then chairman, at most, of the entertainment committee.

Ashley Montagu
Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection.

Ashley Montagu
The Eskimos live among ice all their lives but have no single word for ice.

Ashley Montagu
The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.

Ashley Montagu