Margaret Mead Quotes

190 Sourced Quotes

What the world needs is not romantic lovers who are sufficient unto themselves, but husbands and wives who live in communities, relate to other people, carry on useful work and willingly give time and attention to their children.

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

Margaret Mead
Even very recently, the elders could say: 'You know, I have been young and you never have been old.' But today's young people can reply: 'You never have been young in the world I am young in, and you never can be.'... the older generation will never see repeated in the lives of young people their own unprecedented experience of sequentially emerging change. This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.

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

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

Margaret Mead
We came to realize that a civilization which rode roughshod over the way of life of other peoples was incorporating evil in its own way of life.

Margaret Mead
Most people prefer to carry out the kinds of experiments that allow the scientist to feel that he is in full control of the situation rather than surrendering himself to the situation, as one must in studying human beings as they actually live.

Margaret Mead
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
[In Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.

Margaret Mead
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

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

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

Margaret Mead
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
Monogamous heterosexual love is probably one of the most difficult, complex and demanding of human relationships.

Margaret Mead
Sisters, while they are growing up, tend to be very rivalrous and as young mothers they are given to continual rivalrous comparisons of their several children. But once the children grow older, sisters draw closer together and often, in old age, they become each other's chosen and most happy companions.

Margaret Mead
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
Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.

Margaret Mead
Our young people are faced by a series of different groups which believe different things and advocate different practices, and to each of which some trusted friend or relative may belong. So a girl's father may be a Presbyterian, an imperialist, a vegetarian, a teetotaller, with a strong literary preference for Edmund Burke, a believer in the open shop and a high tariff, who believes that women's place is in the home, that young girls should wear corsets, not roll their stockings, not smoke, nor go riding with young men in the evening. But her mother's father may be a Low Episcopalian, a believer in high living, a strong advocate of States' Rights and the Monroe Doctrine, who reads Rabelais, likes to go to musical shows and horse races...

Margaret Mead
A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Margaret Mead
The assumption that men and woman are essentially alike in all respects, or even in the most important ones, is a damaging one, as damaging as the assumption that they are different in ways in which they aren't different, perhaps more so.

Margaret Mead
The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.

Margaret Mead
We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.

Margaret Mead
No skill, no special apti­tude, no vividness of imagination or precision of thinking would go unrecognized because the child who possessed it was of one sex rather than the other. No child would be relentlessly shaped to one pattern of behavior, but instead there should be many patterns, in a world that had learned to allow to each individual the pattern which was most congenial to his gifts.

Margaret Mead
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
The older child who has lost or broken some valuable thing will be found when his parents return, not run away, not willing to confess, but in a deep sleep The thief whose case is being tried falls asleep

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

Margaret Mead
Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

Margaret Mead
The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

Margaret Mead
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
There are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing.

Margaret Mead