Margaret Mead Quotes (133 quotes, page 2)

“The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 7

Sex

“The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.”

Margaret Mead

Attributed in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1992) edited by James B. Simpson, p. 142
1990s

Way

“In contrast to our own social environment which brings out different aspects of human nature and often demonstrated that behavior which occurs almost invariably in individuals within our society is nevertheless due not to original nature but to social environment; and a homogeneous and simple development of the individual may be studied.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), p. 281, as cited in: Lenora Foerstel, Angela Gilliam (1994) Confronting Margaret Mead: Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific. p. 84

Behavior , Nature , Study

“We — mankind — stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device — our consciousness of the crisis — as our unique contribution.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 3

“During the last hundred years parents and teachers have ceased to take childhood and adolescence for granted. They have attempted to fit education to the needs of the child, rather than to press the child into an inflexible educational mould. To this new task they have been spurred by two forces, the growth of the science of psychology, and the difficulties and maladjustments of youth.”

Margaret Mead

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

Youth , Education , Parent , Teachers

“It has been a woman's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope. lf we are united, we may be able to produce a world in which our children and other people's children will be safe.”

Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead (1978) cited in: United States. National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year The spirit of Houston: the First National Women's Conference. Vol. 84, Nr 1978, p. 153
1970s

Life , Children , People , World

“In this book I am concerned with certain kinds of communication: communication between parents and children, between associates of the same status, between members of different societies and, through the mediation of various kinds of coding—tools, art, script, formulas, film—between cultures distant from each other in time and place. I shall be concerned to show that we must deal not only with evolutionary sequences, in which our ability to articulate and codify parts of the culture enormously increases our ability to intervene in the cultural process, but also with the coexistence at any period of history of earlier forms of communication side by side with later ones.”

Margaret Mead

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

Children , Books , Art , History

“Our treatment of both older [people and children] reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, Go to sleep by yourselves. And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.”

Margaret Mead

As quoted in "Growing Old in America" by Grace Hechinger, in Family Circle magazine (25 July 25 1977)
1970s

Death , Children , People , Birth

“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.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 107

Children , Girl , Lovers

“General systems theory, in a sense, is no news at all, as Von Foerster found out when he attempted to organize a conference of general systems people and anthropologists. In a sense, the situation is comparable to that found by the Committee for the Study of Mankind, in which a committee that included Robert Redfidd tried to get each discipline to consider its relationship to the concept of Mankind. Anthropologists replied, "we are related already," and so they were. Something similar may be said of attempts to date in mathematical anthropology. The kind of information that a computer program can finally provide, on a level of a particular culture, is simply a reflection of how detailed field work has been done, and to the careful field worker, on kinship, for example, it provides no illumination.”

Margaret Mead

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

People , Mathematics , Sense , Study

“Today, as we are coming to understand better the circular processes through which culture is developed and transmitted, we recognize that man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him. Learning, which is based on human dependency, is relatively simple. But human capacities for creating elaborate teachable systems, for understanding and utilizing the resources of the natural world, and for governing society and creating and creating imaginary worlds all these are very complex. In the past, men relied on the least elaborate part of the circular system, the dependent learning by children, for continuity of transmission and for the embodiment of the new. Now, with our greater understanding of the process, we must cultivate the most flexible and complex part of the system; the behavior of adults. We must, in fact, teach ourselves how to alter adult behavior so that we can give up postfigurative upbringing, with its tolerated configurative components, and discover prefigurative ways of teaching and learning. We must create new models for adults who can teach their children not what to learn but how to learn and not what they should be committed to, but the value of commitment.”

Margaret Mead

1970s, Culture and commitment, 1970

Men , Children , World , Way

“Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one. Where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 274 (1953 edition)

Life , Way , Business

“In this very special form, feedback became part of the jargon of Group Dynamics, which has also assumed many of the characteristics of a cult in the efforts made to conserve some of the rigor of procedure with which Kurt Lewin and the experimentalist, Alex Bavelas, had attempted to imbue it. In this case, far from serving as a catalyzing, high-level theoretical tool, the term feedback has become a jargon-catchall for any kind of report back to government, management, the subjects of an experiment, subjects during an experiment, and so on. Stripped of its intellectual potential, the term knocks about the corridors of Unesco and for the most part those who use it have no idea that this bit of enjoined, Group Dynamic-recommended behavior is in any way related to the forbidding cross-disciplinary integration known as cybernetics.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 273

Way , Behavior , Idea , Effort

“Be lazy, go crazy.”

Margaret Mead

As quoted in Margaret Mead: A Life (1984) by Jane Howard, p. 60
1980s

“The student of culture is concerned with a characteristic which man displays more markedly than any other known creature — the ability to transmit what he has learned. In following the procedure I suggest, the learning of Homo sapiens would be treated as a further specialization of the concept of grades, with the recognition that in some species — possibly even in some orders — the ability to learn may represent not only an improvement, in an evolutionary sense, but also an increase in vulnerability. Man's unique, high ability to learn, coupled as it is with a small amount of built-in behavior, represents such a vulnerability.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 30-31

Behavior , Sense , Learning

“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.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 321

Children , Knowledge

“In 1946, a Macy Foundation interdisciplinary conference was organized to use the model provided by "feedback systems," honorifically referred to in earlier conferences as "teleological mechanisms," and later as "cybernetics," with the expectation that this model would provide a group of sciences with useful mathematical tools and, simultaneously, would serve as a form of cross-disciplinary communication. Out of the deliberations of this group came a whole series of fruitful developments of a very high order. Kurt Lewin (who died in 1947) took away from the first meeting the term "feedback". He suggested ways in which group processes, which he and his students were studying in a highly disciplined, rigorous way, could be improved by a "feedback process," as when, for example, a group was periodically given a report on the success or failure of its particular operations.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 272-273

Way , Communication , Mathematics , Failure

“Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.”

Margaret Mead

Culture and Commitment : A Study of the Generation Gap (1970), p. 72
1970s

Family , Way , Support , Box

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

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 302, as cited in Women and Politics : An International Perspective (1987) by Herbert A. Applebaum, p. 18

Men

“For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections.”

Margaret Mead

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

Life , Idea , Knowledge , Science

“In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.”

Margaret Mead

"An Anthropologist Looks at the Teacher's Role" http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/bib/texts/med00marg42anthlook.html, in Educational Method, Vol 21, (1942) p. 219-223
1940s

Life , Way , Behavior , Sense

“We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 321

Sex

“Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.”

Margaret Mead

As quoted in Familiar Medical Quotations (1968) by Maurice Benjamin Strauss, p. 288
1960s

Behavior , Learning

“We will be a better country when each religious group can trust its members to obey the dictates of their own religious faith without assistance from the legal structure of their country.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1970s, Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (1979), p. 71

Faith , Country

“I have tried, in this book, to do three things. I try first to bring a greater awareness of the way in which the differences and the similarities in the bodies of human beings are the basis on which all our learnings about our sex, and our relationship to the other sex, are built. Talking about our bodies is a complex and difficult matter. We are so used to covering them up, to referring to them obliquely with slang terms or in a borrowed language to hiding even infants' sex membership under blue and pink ribbons. It is difficult to become aware of those things about us which have been, and will always be, patterned by our own particular modesties and reticences. We reject, and very rightly, catalogues of caresses arranged in frequency tables, or accounts of childhood that read like a hospital chart…”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 4-5

Books , Sex , Way , Learning

“We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 280, cited in Perspectives in Cultural Anthropology (1987) by Herbert A. Applebaum, p. 141

Sex , Personality , Clothes

“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.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), p. 696, as cited in Social Cognitive Psychology: History and Current Domains (1997), David F. Barone, James E. Maddux, Charles R. Snyder . p. 20

Problem , Freedom

“Women should be permitted to volunteer for non-combat service, […] We have no real way of knowing whether the kinds of training that teach men both courage and restraint would be adaptable to women or effective in a crisis. But the evidence of history and comparative studies of other species suggest that women as a fighting body might be far less amenable to the rules that prevent war from becoming a massacre and, with the use of modern weapons, that protect the survival of all humanity. That is what I meant by saying that women in combat might be too fierce.”

Margaret Mead

"Remarks about the Military Draft" (June 1968) in Margaret Mead, Some Personal Views (1979), edited by Rhoda Metraux, pp. 35–36
1960s

Women , Men , War , Way

“Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 181

Life , Women , Beauty

“The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough … so that the male may in the course of his life reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement, of which his childhood knowledge of the satisfactions of child-bearing have given him a glimpse. In the case of women, it is only necessary that they be permitted by the given social arrangements to fulfil their biological role, to attain this sense of irreversible achievement. If women are to be restless and questing, even in the face of child-bearing, they must be made so through education…. Each culture--in its own way--has developed forms that will make men satisfied in their constructive activities without distorting their sure sense of their masculinity. Fewer cultures have yet found ways in which to give women a divine discontent that will demand other satisfactions than those of child-bearing.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 168-169, as cited in F. Carolyn Graglia (1998) Domestic Tranquility: A brief against Feminism.

Life , Women , Men , Education

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

Margaret Mead

Source: 1970s, Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (1979), p. 118

Women , Men

“As an anthropologist, I have been interested in the effects that the theories of Cybernetics have within our society. I am not referring to computers or to the electronic revolution as a whole, or to the end of dependence on script for knowledge, or to the way that dress has succeeded the mimeographing machine as a form of communication among the dissenting young. Let me repeat that, I am not referring to the way that dress has succeeded the mimeographing machine as a form of communication among the dissenting young.
I speciﬁcally want to consider the signiﬁcance of the set of cross-disciplinary ideas which we ﬁrst called “feed-back” and then called “teleological mechanisms” and then called it “cybernetics,” a form of crossdisciplinary thought which made it possible for members of many disciplines to communicate with each other easily in a language which all could understand.”

Margaret Mead

"Cybernetics of Cybernetics" in Purposive Systems : Proceedings of the First Annual Symposium American Society for Cybernetics (1967) edited by Heinz von Foerster, p. 2; also quoted in " Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/cybernetics/heinz/ethics.pdf" (1991) by Heinz von Foerster
1960s

Way , Communication , Idea , Understanding

“How are men and women to think about their maleness and their femaleness in this twentieth century, in which so many of our old ideas must be made new? Have we over-domesticated men, denied their natural adventurousness, tied them down to machines that are after all only glorified spindles and looms, mortars and pestles and digging sticks, all of which were once women's work? Have we cut women off from their natural closeness to their children, taught them to look for a job instead of the touch of a child's hand, for status in a competitive world rather than a unique place by a glowing hearth? In educating women like men, have we done something disastrous to both men and women alike, or have we only taken one further step in the recurrent task of building more and better on our original human nature?”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 1; Start of first chapter entitled "The Significance of the Questions We Ask"

Women , Men , Children , World

“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.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 321

World , Sex , Behavior , Imagination

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

Margaret Mead

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 147-148

“To cherish the life of the world.”

Margaret Mead

Epitaph, as quoted in Margaret Mead : A Voice for the Century‎ (1982) by Robert Cassidy, p. 152
1980s

Life , World

“p. 14-15 as cited in: Theodore Schwartz (1979) Socialization As Cultural Communication.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1970s, Culture and commitment, 1970, p. 14-15

Communication

“If we are to give our utmost effort and skill and enthusiasm, we must believe in ourselves, which means believing in our past and in our future, in our parents and in our children, in that particular blend of moral purpose and practical inventiveness which is the American character.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942), p. 234—235; cited in Portraits Of Industry (2004) by Lorie A. Annarella, p. 5

Children , Parent , Effort , Past

“Everything is grist for anthropology's mill.”

Margaret Mead

As quoted in Margaret Mead: A Life (1984) by Jane Howard, Ch. 21, p. 319
1980s

“Our young people are faced by a series of different groups which believe different things and advocate different practices, and to each of which some trusted friend or relative may belong. So a girl's father may be a Presbyterian, an imperialist, a vegetarian, a teetotaller, with a strong literary preference for Edmund Burke, a believer in the open shop and a high tariff, who believes that women's place is in the home, that young girls should wear corsets, not roll their stockings, not smoke, nor go riding with young men in the evening. But her mother's father may be a Low Episcopalian, a believer in high living, a strong advocate of States' Rights and the Monroe Doctrine, who reads Rabelais, likes to go to musical shows and horse races…”

Margaret Mead

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

Women , Men , People , Music

“We women are doing pretty well. We're almost back to where we were in the twenties.”

Margaret Mead

1976
As quoted in Margaret Mead: A Life (1984) by Jane Howard, p. 362
1970s

Women

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

Margaret Mead

Attributed in Educational Psychology (2000) by Anita E. Woolfolk, p. 212
2000s

Children , Problem , Dependency

“No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation. We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have. We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.”

Margaret Mead

Radio excerpt presented by Voice of America (17 January 2010) http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/margaret-mead-1901-1978-one-of-the-most-famous-anthropologists-in-the-world-124869344/112571.html
2000s

Knowledge , Learning , Science

“Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.”

Margaret Mead

Attributed inBright Words for Dark Days: Meditations for Women Who Get the Blues (1994) by Caroline Adams Miller, p. 10
1990s

People , Law , Study

“The ability to learn is older — as it is also more widespread — than is the ability to teach.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 44

Learning

“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.”

Margaret Mead

Attributed in The New Quotable Woman (1993) by Elaine Partnow, p. 331
1990s

Food , Question , Waiting , Country

“I think extreme heterosexuality is a perversion.”

Margaret Mead

Attributed in Open Minds: Exploring Global Issues Through Reading and Discussion (1996) by Steven Widdows and Peter Voller, p. 69
1990s

Thinking

“[Mead saw at least two major problems in dating. First, it encourages men and women to define heterosexual relationships as situational, rather than ongoing] You "have a date," you "go out with a date," you "groan because there isn't a decent date in town." A situation defined as containing a girl — or boy — of the right social background, the right degree of popularity, a little higher than your own.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 286, with bracket text from: Mary Ann Lamanna, Agnes Czerwinski Riedmann, Agnes Riedmann [2006] Marriages & Families: Making Choices and Facing Change. p. 191

Women , Men , Girl , Boy

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

Margaret Mead

Cited in: Justin Wintle (2002) Makers of Modern Culture. Vol. 1, p. 350
1970s, Blackberry Winter, 1972

Life , People , Understanding , Study

“They draw back into themselves, and are thrown back on their own bodies for gratification. The men become narcissistic and uncertain of the power of any woman, no matter how strange and beautiful, to arouse their desire, but the women remain continually receptive to male advances.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Balinese Character (1942), p. 26

Women , Men , Beauty , Drawing