Margaret Mead Quotes
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If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter.
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Be lazy, go crazy.
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It is not until science has become a discipline to which the research ability of any mind from any class in society can be attracted that it can become rigorously scientific.
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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.
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In Western Samoa native theory and vocabulary recognized the real pervert who was incapable of normal heterosexual response.
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A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
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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.
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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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The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society.
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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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Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.
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It seems to me very important to continue to distinguish between two evils. It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
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We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.
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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.
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They draw back into themselves, and are thrown back on their own bodies for gratification. The men become narcissistic and uncertain of the power of any woman, no matter how strange and beautiful, to arouse their desire, but the women remain continually receptive to male advances.
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In contrast to our own social environment which brings out different aspects of human nature and often demonstrated that behavior which occurs almost invariably in individuals within our society is nevertheless due not to original nature but to social environment; and a homogeneous and simple development of the individual may be studied.
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Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.
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The first step in the direction of a world rule of law is the recognition that peace no longer is an unobtainable ideal but a necessary condition of continued human existence. But to take even this step we must return to a calm and responsible frame of mind in which we can face the long patient tasks ahead.
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I think extreme heterosexuality is a perversion.
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It this book is, very simply, an account of how three primitive societies have grouped their social attitudes towards temperament about the very obvious facts of sex-difference.
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Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.
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We women are doing pretty well. We're almost back to where we were in the twenties. (1976)
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In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world.
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Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.