Best Margaret Mead Quotes
Margaret Mead Quotes About Civilization, Changing The World, Broken Femur, Success, Education, Death, Gender, Culture, & Marriage! Cultural anthropologist and author Margaret Mead is well-known for her work in the field. Mead was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on December 16, 1901. She attended Barnard College in 1923 and met Boas there, where she graduated in 1923.
Mead earned his Ph.D. in 1929 at Columbia University. The American Museum of Natural History hired Mead in 1926 as an assistant curator of ethnology. She wrote two best-selling memoirs on her time in Samoa and New Guinea, Growing Up in Samoa (1930) and Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). After the publication of Male and Female (1949), Mead maintained that cultural conditioning, rather than inheritance, was responsible for the differences in personality among men and women. Her publications have endured and made anthropology more accessible to a broader audience, despite some detractors calling her fieldwork impressionistic.
Mead rose to prominence as a speaker, frequently delving into contentious social themes. She was also a regular contributor to Redbook magazine and a sought-after interview subject for the publication’s many columns. She remained employed with the American Museum of Natural History through 1969 and was an adjunct lecturer at Columbia University for a brief while. Blackberry winter was Mead’s autobiography released in 1972.
Her most prominent anthropological studies were of illiterate people, and she was well known for her opinions on social topics, including female issues and sexual morality. UNESCO awarded her several honors, including the ‘Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science,’ which she received. Mead passed away in New York City on November 15, 1978.
Best Margaret Mead Quotes
1. “Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.” – Margaret Mead
2. “Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.” – Margaret Mead
3. “Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.” – Margaret Mead
4. “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
5. “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
6. “Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.” – Margaret Mead
7. “We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.” – Margaret Mead
8. “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
9. “An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift.” – Margaret Mead
10. “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
11. “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
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. “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
14. “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
15. “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
16. “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
17. “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
18. “I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.” – Margaret Mead
19. “One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.” – Margaret Mead
20. “Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.” – Margaret Mead
21. “It’s easier for a woman to go into a strange village than a man. If a strange man wanders in, the natives are afraid he’ll take their wives away, but a woman can work with the mothers and children.” – Margaret Mead
22. “Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression.” – Margaret Mead
23. “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
24. “It is easier to change a man’s religion than to change his diet.” – Margaret Mead
25. “The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.” – Margaret Mead
26. “I measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her fellow human beings.” – Margaret Mead
27. “I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.” – Margaret Mead
28. “I learned the value of hard work by working hard.” – Margaret Mead
29. “The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one’s mind.” – Margaret Mead
30. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” – Margaret Mead
31. “And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.” – Margaret Mead
32. “The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measures upon how our children grow up today.” – Margaret Mead
33. “We’re bringing up our children in one-class areas. When they grow up and move to a city or go abroad, they’re not accustomed to variety and they get uncertain and insecure. We should bring up our children where they’re exposed to all types of people.” – Margaret Mead
34. “I like to handle babies. You can learn a lot from the way they respond, the way they slide down your hips, the way they trust you. The first thing a child must learn is to trust.” – Margaret Mead
35. “We have refused to recognize the creativity of youth. We don’t want our children to write poetry or go to the stars. We want them to go steady, get married and have four children.” – Margaret Mead
