Margaret Mead Quotes (133 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Margaret Mead: 133 quotes 28 likes

Famous Margaret Mead Quotes

“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

Source: Kabir, Hajara Muhammad (2010). Northern women development. [Nigeria]. ISBN 978-978-906-469-4. OCLC 890820657 note: 1940s, Male and Female (1949)

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

Margaret Mead

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

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

Margaret Mead

Source: The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future

“We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.”

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

Attributed in Talent Development for English Language Learners: Identifying and Developing Potential (2013) by Michael S. Matthews, Ph.D. SBN-13:9781618211057
2000s
Variant: Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.

“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.”

Margaret Mead

Attributed in American Quotations (1992) by Gorton Carruth and Eugene H. Ehrlich, p. 149
1990s

Margaret Mead Quotes about children

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

Margaret Mead

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

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

Twentieth Century Faith : Hope and Survival (1972), p. 61
1970s

“[Among the Arapeh… both father and mother are held responsible for child care by the entire community…] If one comments upon a middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer: 'Good-looking? Ye-e-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all those children.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 55; cited inWomen, History, and Theory : The Essays of Joan Kelly (1986), by Joan Kelly, p. 137

“Female animals defending their young are notoriously ferocious and lack the playful delight in combat which characterizes the mock combats of males of the same species. There seems very little ground for claiming that the mother of young children is more peaceful, more responsible, and more thoughtful for the welfare of the human race than is her husband or brother.”

Margaret Mead

Introduction
1940s, Male and Female (1949)

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

Margaret Mead

Attributed to Mead in: Fleur L. Strand (1978) Physiology: a regulatory systems approach. p. 509
1970s

Margaret Mead Quotes about women

“I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.”

Margaret Mead

As quoted in Quote Unquote (1977) by Lloyd Cory, p. 364
1970s

“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, and I feel it is up to them to contribute the kinds of awareness that few men… have incorporated through their education.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1970s, Blackberry Winter, 1972, Ch. 14

“The Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes that women need more initiating, more time for maturing of sexual feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blunderer.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 91

“If a society insists that warfare is the major occupation for the male sex, it is therefore insisting that all male children display bravery and pugnacity. Even if the insistence upon the differential bravery of men and women is not made articulate, the difference in occupation makes this point implicitly. When, however, a society goes further and defines men as brave and women as timorous, when men are forbidden to show fear and women are indulged in the most flagrant display of fear, a more explicit element enters in. Originally two variations of human temperament, a hatred of fear or willingness to display fear, they have been socially translated into inalienable aspects of the personalities of the two sexes. And to that defined sex-personality every child will be educated, if a boy, to suppress fear, if a girl, to show it.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 287

“… Her aunt is an agnostic, an ardent advocate of women's rights, an internationalist who rests all her hopes on Esperanto, is devoted to Bernard Shaw, and spends her spare time in campaigns of anti-vivisection. Her elder brother, whom she admires exceedingly, has just spent two years at Oxford. He is an Anglo-Catholic, an enthusiast concerning all things medieval, writes mystical poetry, reads Chesterton, and means to devote his life to seeking for the lost secret of medieval stained glass. Her mother's younger brother is an engineer, a strict materialist, who never recovered from reading Haeckel in his youth; he scorns art, believes that science will save the world, scoffs at everything that was said and thought before the nineteenth century, and ruins his health by experiments in the scientific elimination of sleep. Her mother is of a quietistic frame of mind, very much interested in Indian philosophy, a pacifist, a strict non-participator in life, who in spite of her daughter's devotion to her will not make any move to enlist her enthusiasms. And this may be within the girl's own household. Add to it the groups represented, defended, advocated by her friends, her teachers, and the books which she reads by accident, and the list of possible enthusiasms, of suggested allegiances, incompatible with one another, becomes appalling.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 161

“The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.”

Margaret Mead

"Male and Female" in Ladies' Home Journal, Vol. 66, (September 1949), p. 36;
1940s

Margaret Mead: Trending quotes

“My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.”

Margaret Mead

Education , School

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

Margaret Mead

Attributed in The Quotable Woman (1991) by the Running Press, p. 53
1990s

Home , Night

“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

As reported in "Impeachment?" by Claire Safran, in Redbook (April 1974)
1970s

Law

Margaret Mead Quotes

“I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had.”

Margaret Mead

People , Fools

“We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.”

Margaret Mead

Problem

“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

As quoted in Teacher's Treasury of Stories for Every Occasion (1958) by Millard Dale Baughman, p. 69
1950s

Age , Learning , Childhood , Falseness

“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

People , Support , Past , Future

“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

Source: 1970s, Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (1979), p. 249

Success , Personality

“If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1970s, Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (1979), p. 252-253

Intelligence , Understanding , Universe

“My material on Samoa was gathered during a nine-month field trip in 1925–26 as a Fellow in the Biological Sciences of the National Research Council, on a research project designated as the study of the adolescent girl.
The Samoan Islands, with a population in 1926 of 40,229, are peopled by a Polynesian group, a people with light brown skin and wavy black hair who speak a Polynesian language. The islands were Christianized in the first half of the nineteenth century and were administratively divided between a League of Nations Mandate under New Zealand called Western Samoa, which comprised the islands of Upolu and Savaii, and American Samoa, which was governed by the United States Navy.
All my detailed work was done in the remote islands of the Manua group, principally in the village of Tau on the island of Tau.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 338

People , Girl , Study , Light

“Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression.”

Margaret Mead

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.
Source: 1970s, Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (1979), p. 121

Laughter

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

Margaret Mead

Quote magazine (15 June 1958)
1950s
Context: When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed. Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to be as mediocre as possible.

Women , Men

“No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.”

Margaret Mead

"Future Families", in The American People in the Age of Kennedy (1973) edited by David M. Kennedy , p. 108
1970s
Context: 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.

Family , Communication

“You know you love someone when you cannot put into words how they make you feel.”

Margaret Mead

Love , Feeling

“Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.”

Margaret Mead

People , Feeling , Sleep

“It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.”

Margaret Mead

Religion , Change

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

Margaret Mead

Attributed in La Abogada newsletter, Vol. 3 (1967) by International Federation of Women Lawyers, p. 5
1960s

Time

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

Margaret Mead

Attributed in Sisters by Birth Friends by Choice : All the Things I Love About You (2003) by Ellyn Sanna
2000s

Family , Family , Sister

“An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift”

Margaret Mead

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

Margaret Mead

Attributed in Banned Books Week '93: Celebrating the Freedom to Read (1993) by Robert P. Doyle, p. 62
1990s

History , Time

“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

Attributed in Psychology (1990) by Carole Wade and Carol Tavris, p. 372
1990s

World

“I learned to observe the world around me, and to note what I saw”

Margaret Mead

World , Learning

“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 gift will find a fitting place.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 322
Context: Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. It will not be by the mere abolition of these distinctions that society will develop patterns in which individual gifts are given place instead of being forced into an ill-fitting mould. 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.

“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

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 1

Travel , Home , Knowledge

“Each man's place in the social scheme of his village is know; the contribution which he must make to the work and ceremonial of the village and the share of the whole which he will receive back again are likewise defined. For failure to receive what is due to him, he is fined even more heavily than for failure to give that which is due from him. Just as a man must accept his privileges as well as discharge his duties, so is he also the guardian of his own status and if, as may happen to a high caste, that status is affronted, he himself must perform a ceremony to restore it.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Balinese Character (1942), p. 7

Failure

“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.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1950s, People and Places (1959), p. 198

Problem

“The older child who has lost or broken some valuable thing will be found when his parents return, not run away, not willing to confess, but in a deep sleep The thief whose case is being tried falls asleep”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Balinese Character (1942), p. 39 as cited in: E. Bruce Goldstein (1994) Psychology. p. 511

Parent , Sleep

“Throughout history, females have picked providers for mates. Males pick anything.”

Margaret Mead

Attributed in 3,500 Good Quotes for Speakers (1985) edited by Gerald F. Lieberman, p. 114
1980s

History

“Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.”

Margaret Mead

As quoted in Margaret Mead, World's Grandmother (1975) by Ann Morse, Charles Morse, Harold Henriksen, p. 9
1970s

Life , Time

“[In Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Balinese Character (1942), p. 48

Life

“The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it alone.”

Margaret Mead

As quoted in Quotations for Our Time (1977), by Laurence J. Peter, p. 509
1970s

World

“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

As quoted in Margaret Mead: A Life (1984) by Jane Howard; cited in Journey Through Womanhood : Meditations from Our Collective Soul (2002) by Tian Dayton, p. 46
1980s

Love , Dance

“The last 20 years have· seen an enormous growth of institutions devoted to anthropological enterprises, membership within the discipline, and students, text books, and paraphernalia. From a tiny scholarly group that could easily be fitted into a couple of buses, and most of whom knew each other, we have grown into a group of tremendous, anonymous milling crowds, meeting at large hotels where there are so many sessions that people do well to find those of their colleagues who are interested in the same specialty. Today we look something like the other social science disciplines, suffering some of the same malaise, and becoming cynical about slave markets and worried when grants and jobs seem to be declining.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1970s, Changing Styles of Anthropological Work, 1973, p. 1

People , Books , Suffering , Science

“I learned the value of hard work by working hard.”

Margaret Mead

Attributed in You Vs. You: Sport Psychology Got Life (2005) by Wayne Mazzoni, p. 90
2000s

Learning

“In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1950s, People and Places (1959), p. 198

Children , People , World , Way

“Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary. By a great effort man has hit upon a method of compensating himself for his basic inferiority. Equipped with various mysterious noise-making instruments, whose potency rests upon their actual form's being unknown to those who hear the sounds — that is, the women and children must never know that they are really bamboo flutes, or hollow logs, or bits of elliptic wood whirled on strings — they can get the male children away from the women, brand them as incomplete, and themselves turn boys into men. Women, it is true, make human beings, but only men can make men.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 84 as cited in: John Whiting, Eleanor Hollenberg Chasdi, Roy D'Andrade (2006) Culture and Human Development: The Selected Papers of John Whiting. p. 240

Women , Men , Children , Boy

“[Our goal was to] translate aspects of culture never successfully recorded by the scientist, although often caught by the artist, into some form of communication sufficiently clear and sufficiently unequivocal to satisfy the requirements of scientific enquiry.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Balinese Character (1942), p. xi

Communication

“It is not until science has become a discipline to which the research ability of any mind from any class in society can be attracted that it can become rigorously scientific.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), p. 406

Science

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

Margaret Mead

Attributed in Teaching Music Through Performance In Band, Vol. 3 (2000), edited by Richard B. Miles, Larry Blocher, Eugene Corporon, p. 13
2000s

People

“It [this book] is, very simply, an account of how three primitive societies have grouped their social attitudes towards temperament about the very obvious facts of sex-difference.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. xvi

Books , Sex

“It seems to me very important to continue to distinguish between two evils. It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.”

Margaret Mead

As quoted in Margaret Mead : Some Personal Views (1979) edited by Rhoda Métraux
As quoted in American Quotations (1992) by Gorton Carruth and Eugene H. Ehrlich
1970s
Variant: At times it may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

Evil

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

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942), p. 134

Nature

“There has been an increased but still rather limited response to general systems theory, as variously reflected in the work of Bateson, Vayda, Rappaport, Adams, and an interest in the use of computers, programming, matrices, etc. But the interaction between general systems theory (as represented, for example, by the theoretical work of Von Bertalanffy) has been compromised, partly by the state of field data, extraordinarily incomparable as it inevitably is, as well as historical anthropological methods of dealing with wholes. General systems theory has taken its impetus from the excitement of discovering larger and larger contexts, on the one hand, and a kind of microprobing into fine detail within a system, on the other. Both of these activities are intrinsic to anthropology to the extent that field work in living societies has been the basic disciplinary method. It is no revelation to any field-experienced anthropologist that everything is related to everything else, or that whether the entire sociocultural setting can be studied in detail or not, it has to be known in general outline.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1970s, Changing Styles of Anthropological Work, 1973, p. 8

Study

“[Mead described the Arapesh as a culture in which both sexes were] placid and contented, unaggressive and noninitiatory, noncompetitive and responsive, warm, docile, and trusting.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 39 as cited in: Guy R. Lefrançois (1973) Of children; an introduction to child development. p. 65

Sex

“Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.”

Margaret Mead

Attributed in Two Hugs for Survival (1982) by Harold A. Minden (1982), p. 22
1980s

“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 economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 131 (1973 edition)

Peace

“!-- This is my most misunderstood book, and I have devoted some attention to trying to understand why. … --> I have been accused of having believed when I wrote Sex and Temperament that there are no sex differences … This, many readers felt, was too much. It was too pretty. I must have found what I was looking for. But this misconception comes from a lack of understanding of what anthropology means, of 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.”

Margaret Mead

Preface of 1950 edition of Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. xxvi 
[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.
As quoted in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2012) by Carl C. Gaither and Alma E. Cavazos-Gaither
1950s

Books , Sex , Understanding

“I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 6-7

Question , Nature

“If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.”

Margaret Mead

Attributed to Mead in Mead Childhood Education Vol. 54 (1977) by Association for Childhood Education International, p. 126
1970s

Life , People , Sense

“Envy of the male role can come as much from an undervaluation of the role of wife and mother as from an overvaluation of the public aspects of achievement that have been reserved for men.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 77