Margaret Mead Quotes

190 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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.

Margaret Mead
Both men and women are conceived as merely capable of response to a situation that their society has already defined for them as sexual, and so the Arapesh feel that it is necessary to chaperon betrothed couples who are too young... with their definition of sex as a response to an external situation rather than as spontaneous desire, both men and women are regarded as helpless in the face of seduction. Parents warn their sons even more than they warn their daughters against permitting themselves to get into situations in which someone can make love to them.

Margaret Mead
Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.

Margaret Mead
The primary evidence that our present situation is unique, without any parallel in the past, is that the generation gap is world-wide. The particular events taking place in any country — China, England, Pakistan, Japan, the United States, New Guinea, or elsewhere — are not enough to explain the unrest that is stirring modern youth everywhere.

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

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

Margaret Mead
One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

Margaret Mead
What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Mead