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Margaret Mead Quotes
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Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College in New York City and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.

Mead was a respected and often controversial academic who popularized the insights of anthropology in modern American and Western culture. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. She was a proponent of broadening sexual mores within a context of traditional Western religious life.



✵ 16. December 1901 – 15. November 1978
Margaret Mead photo
Margaret Mead: 133   quotes 28   likes

Margaret Mead Quotes

“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.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 335

Life , Marriage , People , Knowledge

“We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.”

Margaret Mead

Attributed in How They Work In Indiana : Business-Education Partnerships (1994) by Andrew L. Zehner (1994), p. 3
1990s

Children , Education , School

“The first step in the direction of a world rule of law is the recognition that peace no longer is an unobtainable ideal but a necessary condition of continued human existence. But to take even this step we must return to a calm and responsible frame of mind in which we can face the long patient tasks ahead.”

Margaret Mead

"Are Shelters the Answer?", in The New York Times Magazine (26 November 1961), p. 125
1960s

World , Peace , Law

“Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 191

Nature

“Cultural systems will be treated as extensions of the power to learn, store, and transmit information, and the evolution of culture as dependent upon the biological development of these abilities and the cultural developments that actualize them. Man's increasing mastery over the natural world, with its increments of available energy use, can be seen from this point of view as one consequence of his capacity to learn, invent, borrow, store, and transmit the necessary technological and political inventions for the changes of scale involved in increasing utilization of energy. Instead of focusing attention on discontinuities — the invention of tool-making tools, the invention of agriculture, the invention of writing, and the invention of invention as a conscious pursuit—this discussion will focus on the continuities involved and on the extent to which older forms of communication, energy use, and social organization also undergo transformation in the course of cultural evolution.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 31-32

World , Communication , Nature , Learning

“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.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 140

Love , Women , Men , Making love

“What are the rewards of the tiny, ingrown, biological family opposing its closed circle of affection to a forbidding world of the strong ties between parent and children, ties which an active personal relation from birth until death?… Perhaps these are too heavy prices to pay for a specialization of emotions which might be bought about the other ways, notable through coeducation. And with such a question in our minds its interesting to note that a larger family community, in which there are several adult men and women, seems to ensure the child against the development of the crippling attitudes which have been labelled Oedipus complexes, the Electra complexes, and so on.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 147; Partly cited in: E. Michael Jones (1993) Degenerate Moderns: Modernity As Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior. p. 24-25

Death , Women , Men , Children

“We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.”

Margaret Mead

"The Energy Crisis — Why Our World Will Never Again Be the Same", in Redbook (1974); later in Progress As If Survival Mattered : A Handbook For A Conserver Society (1977) by Hugh Nash, p. 166
1970s

Life , Children , People , World

“Orientation in time, space, and status are the essentials of social existence, and the Balinese, although they make very strong spirits for ceremonial occasions, with a few startling exceptions resist alcohol, because if one drinks one loses one's orientation. Orientation is felt as a protection rather than as a strait jacket and its loss provokes extreme anxiety.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Balinese Character (1942), p. 11

Alcohol , Drink , Strong , Loss

“Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 48

Sex , Personality , Training

“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.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 322

Sex

“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.”

Margaret Mead

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