Margaret Mead Quotes
Old age is like flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do.
We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.
Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.
What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.
I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.
It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.
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.
I learned the value of hard work by working hard.
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.
Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.
One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are, when you don't come home at night.
Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.
Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.
I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.
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.
Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.
The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.
As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.
Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.
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.
I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.
If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter.
The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates. Not only does he picture us caught in a tremendous man-made or God-made trap from which there is no escape, but we must also listen to him day in, day out, describe how the trap is inexorably closing. To such prophecies the human race, as presently bred and educated and situated, is incapable of listening. So some dance and some immolate themselves as human torches; some take drugs and some artists spill their creativity in sets of randomly placed dots on a white ground.
A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
