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 eco… - Margaret Mead

I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples — faraway peoples — so that Americans might better understand themselves.

Both men and women are conceived as merely capable of response to a situation that their society has already defined for them as sexual, and so the Arapesh feel that it is necessary to chaperon betrothed couples who are too young... with their definition of sex as a response to an external situation rather than as spontaneous desire, both men and women are regarded as helpless in the face of seduction. Parents warn their sons even more than they warn their daughters against permitting themselves to get into situations in which someone can make love to them.

Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.