Margaret Mead - Life Quotes

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Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

Margaret Mead
Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one. Where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.

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
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
[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
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
No one will live all his life in the world into which he was born and no one will die in the world in which he worked in his maturity.

Margaret Mead
The closest friends I have made all through life have been people who also grew up close to a loved and loving grandmother or grandfather.

Margaret Mead
In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.

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
In each age there is a series of pressing questions which must be asked and answered. On the correctness of the questions depends the survival of those who ask; on the quality of the answers depends the quality of the life those survivors will lead.

Margaret Mead
Whatever advantages may have arisen, in the past, out of the existence of a specially favored and highly privileged aristocracy, it is clear to me that today no argument can stand that supports unequal opportunity or any intrinsic disqualification for sharing in the whole of life.

Margaret Mead
For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections.

Margaret Mead
The experience of having brothers and sisters, born of the same parents, sleeping under the same roof, eating at the same table, is an inescapable, delightful and repelling, desired and abhorred part of each child's life.

Margaret Mead
Through a grandmother's voice and hands the end of life is known at the beginning.

Margaret Mead
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.

Margaret Mead
We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

Margaret Mead
Mourning has become unfashionable in the United States. The bereaved are supposed to pull themselves together as quickly as possible and to reweave the torn fabric of life.... we do not allow... for the weeks and months during which a loss is realized — a beautiful word that suggests the transmutation of the strange into something that is one's own.

Margaret Mead
It has been a woman's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope. lf we are united, we may be able to produce a world in which our children and other people's children will be safe.

Margaret Mead