Margaret Mead Quotes

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.

We women are doing pretty well. We're almost back to where we were in the twenties. (1976)

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.

L'éducation est un processus culturel (...) par lequel chaque nouvel individu est transformé en membre à part entière d'une société humaine particulière, partageant avec les autres membres une culture particulière.

CHILDREN MUST BE TAUGHT HOW TO THINK, NOT WHAT TO THINK

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

People are still encouraged to marry as if they could count on marriage being for life, and at the same time they are absorbing a knowledge of the great frequency of divorce.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social.

[Partly as a consequence of male authority] prestige value always attaches to the activities of men.

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

A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.'
- James Baldwin

With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long as possible and then to marry in one's own village, near one's own relatives, and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

There is no necessary connection between warfare and human nature. Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.