Margaret Mead Quotes

[In Western Samoa] native theory and vocabulary recognized the real pervert who was incapable of normal heterosexual response.

Learned behaviors have replaced the biologically given ones.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is 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.

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.

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

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.

No skill, no special apti­tude, no vividness of imagination or precision of thinking would go unrecognized because the child who possessed it was of one sex rather than the other. No child would be relentlessly shaped to one pattern of behavior, but instead there should be many patterns, in a world that had learned to allow to each individual the pattern which was most congenial to his gifts.

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.

"The notion that we are products of our environment is our greatest sin; we are products of our choices."
Margaret Mead
(this may not be her exact wording, but it's close enough).

Tutte le discussioni sullo stato delle donne, sul carattere e il temperamento delle donne, sulla sottomissione o l’emancipazione delle donne, fanno perdere di vista il fatto fondamentale, e cioè che le parti dei due sessi sono concepite secondo la trama culturale che sta alla base dei rapporti umani e che il fanciullo che cresce è modellato, altrettanto inesorabilmente comeLa fanciulla, secondo un canone particolare e ben definito.

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.

There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing...when we save our children, we save ourselves

We must turn all of our educational efforts to training our children for the choices which will confront them... The child who is to choose wisely must be healthy in mind and body. The children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.