Margaret Mead was a reputed American anthropologist who applied techniques and theories from modern psychology to understanding culture. She appeared in mass media frequently in the 60s and 70s and spoke about the different natures of male and female in various cultures.
She verbalized quotes that reflected human nature and modern society. This article will present you with the best 50 quotes by Margaret Mead that will provide you an insight into human characteristics.
1. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”– Margaret Mead
2. “What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”– Margaret Mead
3. “It is easier to change a man’s religion than to change his diet.”– Margaret Mead
4. “You know you love someone when you cannot put into words how they make you feel.”– Margaret Mead
5. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”– Margaret Mead
6. “Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”– Margaret Mead
7. “Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.”– Margaret Mead
8. “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
“9. One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.”– Margaret Mead
10. “Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.”– Margaret Mead
11. “Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.”– Margaret Mead
12. “You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way.”– Margaret Mead
13. “What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.”– Margaret Mead
14. “Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.”– Margaret Mead
15. “I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don’t agree with or like.”– Margaret Mead
16. “We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.”– Margaret Mead
17. “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
18. “Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.”– Margaret Mead
19. “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.”– Margaret Mead
20. “An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift.”– Margaret Mead
21. “We talk about our high standard of living in this country. What we have is a high standard of work. Usually the peaks of civilization have been periods when a large proportion of the population had time to live. I don’t think we’re doing this today. I think the people who could live are still spending their time and supplementary resources on making a living.”– Margaret Mead
22. “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.”– Margaret Mead
23. “I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.”– Margaret Mead
24. “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
25. “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
26. “Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression.”– Margaret Mead
27. “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
28. “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
29. “Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.”– Margaret Mead
30. “The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.”– Margaret Mead
31. “Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.”– Margaret Mead
32. “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
33. “Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to cooperate.”– Margaret Mead
34. “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
35. “A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.”– Margaret Mead
36. “For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen.”– Margaret Mead
37. “No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.”– Margaret Mead
38. “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
39. “The most intractable problem today is not pollution or technology or war; but the lack of belief that the future is very much in the hands of the individual.”– Margaret Mead
40. “Humanity . . . lies in man’s capacity to question the known and imagine the unknown.”– Margaret Mead
41. “Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.”– Margaret Mead
42. “There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a postmenopausal woman.”– Margaret Mead
43. “Be who you really are, do what you want to do, in order to have what you really want.”– Margaret Mead
44. “There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.”– Margaret Mead
45. “When a person is born we rejoice, and when they’re married we jubilate, but when they die we try to pretend nothing has happened.”– Margaret Mead
46. “My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.”– Margaret Mead
47. “Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly.”– Margaret Mead
48. “Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention.”– Margaret Mead
49. “No country that permits firearms to be widely and randomly distributed among its population – especially firearms that are capable of wounding and killing human beings – can expect to escape violence, and a great deal of violence.”– Margaret Mead
50. “I learned the value of hard work by working hard.”– Margaret Mead
