Margaret Mead Quotes
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No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back. You can get rid of it if you live in an enclave and keep everybody else out, and bring the children up to be unfit to live anywhere else. They can go on ignoring the family for several generations. But such communities are not part of the main world.
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A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.
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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.
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Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
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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.
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One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.
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The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.
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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.
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Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
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Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man.
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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.
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What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.
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Today our approaches to children are fragmented and partial. Those who care for well children know little of children who are sick. The deep knowledge that comes from the intensive attempt to cure is separated from the knowledge of those whose main task is to teach.
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Partly as a consequence of male authority prestige value always attaches to the activities of men.
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If we are to give our utmost effort and skill and enthusiasm, we must believe in ourselves, which means believing in our past and in our future, in our parents and in our children, in that particular blend of moral purpose and practical inventiveness which is the American character.
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I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.
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Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform.
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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.
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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.
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Be lazy, go crazy.
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I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.
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A society which is clamouring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice.
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I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples - faraway peoples - so that Americans might better understand themselves.
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Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.