Margaret Mead: Quotes about people

Margaret Mead was American anthropologist. Explore interesting quotes on people.
Margaret Mead: 266   quotes 28   likes

“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

People , World , Change

“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

“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

“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

Children , People , Age , Religion

“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

“[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

Children , People , Age , Communication

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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