Margaret Mead: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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

Men , Envy