Top 50 Ashley Montagu Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The idea is to die young as late as possible.”

— Ashley Montagu

2. “Without love, intelligence is dangerous; without intelligence, love is not enough.”

— Ashley Montagu

3. “In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message.”

— Ashley Montagu

4. “By virtue of being born to humanity, every human being has a right to the development and fulfillment of his potentialities as a human being.”

— Ashley Montagu

5. “Love is the supreme form of communication. In the hierarchy of needs, love stands as the supreme developing agent of the humanity of the person. As such, the teaching of love should be the central core of all early childhood curriculum with all other subjects growing naturally out of such teaching.”

— Ashley Montagu

6. “Psychosclerosis: the hardening of the attitude which causes a person to cease dreaming, seeing, thinking, and leading.”

— Ashley Montagu

7. “The way I change my life is to act as if I am the person I really want to be.”

— Ashley Montagu

8. “Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.”

— Ashley Montagu

9. “The cultured man is an artist, an artist in humanity.”

— Ashley Montagu

10. “The natural superiority of women is a biological fact, and a socially acknowledged reality.”

— Ashley Montagu

11. “The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.”

— Ashley Montagu

12. “The world is so full of wonderful things we should all, if we were taught how to appreciate it, be far richer than kings.”

— Ashley Montagu

13. “The idea of “race” represents one of the most dangerous myths of our time.”

— Ashley Montagu

14. “The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.”

— Ashley Montagu

15. “To admit ignorance is to exhibit wisdom.”

— Ashley Montagu

16. “Hatred is love frustrated.”

— Ashley Montagu

17. “Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.”

— Ashley Montagu

18. “The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness.”

— Ashley Montagu

19. “The evidence indicates that woman is, on the whole, biologically superior to man.”

— Ashley Montagu

20. “One goes through school, college, medical school and one’s internship learning little or nothing about goodness but a good deal about success.”

— Ashley Montagu

21. “It is not the most lovable individuals who stand more in need of love, but the most unlovable.”

— Ashley Montagu

22. “The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.”

— Ashley Montagu

23. “Human communication, ‘as the saying goes, is a clash of symbols’ it covers a multitude of signs. But it is more than media and messages, information and persuasion; it also meets a deeper need and serves a higher purpose. Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection.”

— Ashley Montagu

24. “The only measure of what you believe is what you do.”

— Ashley Montagu

25. “It is the function of women to teach men how to be human.”

— Ashley Montagu

26. “The Good Book – one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.”

— Ashley Montagu

27. “It’s by what you do that you communicate to others that you are deeply involved in their well being.”

— Ashley Montagu

28. “The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health.”

— Ashley Montagu

29. “The family is the basis of society. As the family is, so is the society, and it is human beings who make a family-not the quantity of them, but the quality of them.”

— Ashley Montagu

30. “The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe, don’t read what they write, don’t ask what they believe, just observe what they do.”

— Ashley Montagu

31. “The benefits to the mother of immediate breastfeeding are innumerable, not the least of which after the weariness of labor and birth is the emotional gratification, the feeling of strength, the composure, and the sense of fulfillment that comes with the handling and suckling of the baby.”

— Ashley Montagu

32. “The loving touch, like music, often utters the things that cannot be spoken.”

— Ashley Montagu

33. “It is the mark of the cultured man that he is aware of the fact that equality is an ethical and not a biological principle.”

— Ashley Montagu

34. “The basic fact is simple: life begins not at birth, but conception.”

— Ashley Montagu

35. “Today, while the titular head of the family may still be the father, everyone knows that he is little more than chairman, at most, of the entertainment committee.”

— Ashley Montagu

36. “An intelligence that is not humane is the most dangerous thing in the world .”

— Ashley Montagu

37. “Girls marry for love. Boys marry because of a chronic irritation that causes them to gravitate in the direction of objects with certain curvilinear properties.”

— Ashley Montagu

38. “Scientists do not believe in fundamental and absolute certainties. For the scientist, certainty is never an end, but a search; not the ordering of certainty, but its exploration. For the scientist, certainty represents the highest degree of probability.”

— Ashley Montagu

39. “Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.”

— Ashley Montagu

40. “The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.”

— Ashley Montagu

41. “Love, for too many men in our time, consists of sleeping with a seductive woman, one who is properly endowed with the right distribution of curves and conveniences and one upon whom a permanent lien has been acquired through the institution of marriage.”

— Ashley Montagu

42. “The Eskimos live among ice all their lives but have no single word for ice.”

— Ashley Montagu

43. “Man is the only 150 pound nonlinear servomechanism that can be wholly reproduced by unskilled labor.”

— Ashley Montagu

44. “In Victorian times the purpose of life was to develop a personality once and for all and then stand on it.”

— Ashley Montagu

45. “The behavioral trait most frequently associated with the long-lived is placidity.”

— Ashley Montagu

46. “The majority of people believe in incredible things which are absolutely false. The majority of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being.”

— Ashley Montagu

47. “The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family ‘gets together’ alone.”

— Ashley Montagu

48. “The measure of man’s humanity is the extent and intensity of his love for mankind.”

— Ashley Montagu

49. “Children are the most learning-hungry beings in the world.”

— Ashley Montagu

50. “Because women live creatively, they rarely experience the need to depict or write about that which to them is a primary experience and which men know only at a second remove. Women create naturally, men create artificially.”

— Ashley Montagu