Quotes By Margaret Mead

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.

Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.

Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.

Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.

As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.

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

The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one's mind.

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

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

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

Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.

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.

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.

Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.

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.

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

Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.

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

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

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

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

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.

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.