Top 180 Margaret Mead Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “What the world needs is not romantic lovers who are sufficient unto themselves, but husbands and wives who live in communities, relate to other people, carry on useful work and willingly give time and attention to their children.”

— Margaret Mead

52. “Be who you really are, do what you want to do, in order to have what you really want.”

— Margaret Mead

53. “For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.”

— Margaret Mead

54. “For art to be reality, the whole sensuous being must be caught up in the experience.”

— Margaret Mead

55. “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world.”

— Margaret Mead

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “The Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes that women need more initiating, more time for maturing of sexual feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blunderer.”

— Margaret Mead

60. “The problem with America today is that too many people know too much about not enough.”

— Margaret Mead

61. “The atmosphere is the key symbol of global interdependence.”

— Margaret Mead

62. “EARTH DAY reminds the people of the world of the need for continuing care which is vital to Earth’s safety.”

— Margaret Mead

63. “Women have an important contribution to make.”

— Margaret Mead

64. “I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples – faraway peoples – so that Americans might better understand themselves.”

— Margaret Mead

65. “It is not until science has become a discipline to which the research ability of any mind from any class in society can be attracted that it can become rigorously scientific.”

— Margaret Mead

66. “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

67. “If man has not found ways to deal with environmental problems such as water and air pollution by 1998, it will be too late. The future is not determined and it lies in our own hands.”

— Margaret Mead

68. “Monogamous heterosexual love is probably one of the most difficult, complex and demanding of human relationships.”

— Margaret Mead

69. “You are totally unique. Just like everyone else.”

— Margaret Mead

70. “It has been a woman’s task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope.”

— Margaret Mead

71. “I’ve been married three times – and each time I married the right person.”

— Margaret Mead

72. “We are at a point in history where a proper attention to space, and especially near space, may be absolutely crucial in bringing the world together.”

— Margaret Mead

73. “Jealousy is not a barometer by which the depth of love can be read. It merely records the degree of the lover’s insecurity.”

— Margaret Mead

74. “The most extraordinary thing about a really good teacher is that he or she transcends accepted educational methods. Such methods are designed to help average teachers approximate the performance of good teachers.”

— Margaret Mead

75. “We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.”

— Margaret Mead

76. “Any town that doesn’t have sidewalks doesn’t love its children.”

— Margaret Mead

77. “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

78. “For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen.”

— Margaret Mead

79. “Samoa culture demonstrates how much the tragic or the easy solution of the Oedipus situation depends upon the inter-relationship between parents and children, and is not created out of whole cloth by the young child’s biological impulses.”

— Margaret Mead

80. “Grandparents are given a second chance to enjoy parenthood with fewer of its tribulations and anxieties.”

— Margaret Mead

81. “No one will live all his life in the world into which he was born and no one will die in the world in which he worked in his maturity.”

— Margaret Mead

82. “Our human situation no longer permits us to make armed dichotomies between those who are good and those who are evil, those who are right and those who are wrong. The first blow dealt to the enemy’s children will sign the death warrant of our own.”

— Margaret Mead

83. “Dancing is the only activity in which almost all ages and both sexes participate.”

— Margaret Mead

84. “Living in the modern world, clothed and muffled, forced to convey our sense of our bodies in terms of remote symbols like walking sticks and umbrellas and handbags, it is easy to lose sight of the immediacy of the human body plan.”

— Margaret Mead

85. “Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.”

— Margaret Mead

86. “The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer.”

— Margaret Mead

87. “I’m unique just like everyone else.”

— Margaret Mead

88. “With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities.”

— Margaret Mead

89. “The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as – carried too far – one of its weaknesses.”

— Margaret Mead

90. “Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.”

— Margaret Mead

91. “I was a child that both my parents wanted. I was told from the time I was born that I was totally satisfactory. I had a chance to be what I wanted to be.”

— Margaret Mead

92. “I am interested in what happens to people who find the whole of life so rewarding that they are able to move through it with the same kind of delight in which a child moves through a game.”

— Margaret Mead

93. “We must turn all of our educational efforts to training our children for the choices which will confront them... The child who is to choose wisely must be healthy in mind and body. The children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”

— Margaret Mead

94. “Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.”

— Margaret Mead

95. “No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.”

— Margaret Mead

96. “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

97. “Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.”

— Margaret Mead

98. “I don’t consider my marriages as failures! It’s idiotic to assume that because a marriage ends, it’s failed.”

— Margaret Mead

99. “Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.”

— Margaret Mead

100. “It was not until we saw the picture of the earth, from the moon, that we realized how small and how helpless this planet is – something that we must hold in our arms and care for.”

— Margaret Mead