Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead

"I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?"
49 Quotes
"I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?"
Margaret Mead
"It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet."
Margaret Mead
"Children must be taught how to think, not what to think."
Margaret Mead
"Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents."
Margaret Mead
"We won't have a society if we destroy the environment."
Margaret Mead
"One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night."
Margaret Mead
"A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead
"Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have."
Margaret Mead
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead
"I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings."
Margaret Mead
"For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders."
Margaret Mead
"Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders."
Margaret Mead
"Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible."
Margaret Mead
"Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women."
Margaret Mead
"It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age."
Margaret Mead
"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
"Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship."
Margaret Mead
"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."
Margaret Mead
"Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess."
Margaret Mead
"Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive."
Margaret Mead
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