“Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.”
As quoted in Margaret Mead, World's Grandmother (1975) by Ann Morse, Charles Morse, Harold Henriksen, p. 9
1970s
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Margaret Mead 133
American anthropologist 1901–1978Related quotes

Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule — always do what's most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down.

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

As quoted in "The Bolton Embarrassment" in The Nation (1 August 2005) http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=9416

“The responsibility of writers,” p. 167
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

As quoted in The Vegetarian Solution: Your Answer to Cancer, Heart Disease, Global Warming and More (2007) by Stewart D. Rose, p. 114

R. G. Collingwood (1937), as cited in: Patrick Suppes (1973), Logic, methodology and philosophy of science: Proceedings.