Margaret Mead

I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don’t agree
with or like.
– Margaret Mead

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
– Margaret Mead

Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to be as mediocre as possible.
– Margaret Mead

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual
makes to her or his fellow human beings.
– Margaret Mead

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of
accurate information in the world.
– Margaret Mead

You know you love someone when you cannot put into words how they make you feel.
– Margaret Mead

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.
– Margaret Mead

The central problem of every society is to define appropriate roles for the men.
– Margaret Mead

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the
work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
– Margaret Mead

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

It has been a woman’s task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was
almost no hope.
– Margaret Mead

Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention.
– Margaret Mead

We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable
problems.
– Margaret Mead

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

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

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.
– Margaret Mead

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
– 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

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

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.
– Margaret Mead

Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that
at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their
mothers-in-law.
– 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

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own
doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more
steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.
– Margaret Mead

Because of their age-long training in human relations, for that is what feminine intuition really
is, women have a special contribution to make to any group enterprise.
– Margaret Mead

We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.
– Margaret Mead

If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who
will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the
past.
– 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

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.
– Margaret Mead

Having someone wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night is a very old
human need.
– 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

It is easier to change a man’s religion than to change his diet.
– Margaret Mead

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.
– Margaret Mead

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole
gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each
diverse human gift will find a fitting place.
– Margaret Mead

Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.
– Margaret Mead

Sisters is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters
are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.
– Margaret Mead

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.
– Margaret Mead

We will be a better country when each religious group can trust its members to obey the
dictates of their own religious faith without assistance from the legal structure of their
country.
– 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

Sooner or later I’m going to die, but I’m not going to retire.
– Margaret Mead

No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to
waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation. We have to learn to cherish this earth
and cherish it as something that’s fragile, that’s only one, it’s all we have. We have to use
our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.
– Margaret Mead

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: You have to get it right the first time.
– Margaret Mead

The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from
the bottom to the top of American society.
– Margaret Mead

All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world,
living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before. The young are at home
here. Their eyes have always seen satellites in the sky. They have never known a world in
which war did not mean annihilation.
– Margaret Mead