Top 180 Margaret Mead Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Blackberry winter, the time when the hoarforst lies on the blackberry blossoms; without this frost the berries will not set. It is the forerunner of a rich harvest.”

— Margaret Mead

102. “The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it alone.”

— Margaret Mead

103. “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

104. “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

105. “What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love.”

— Margaret Mead

106. “It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.”

— Margaret Mead

107. “People are still encouraged to marry as if they could count on marriage being for life, and at the same time they are absorbing a knowledge of the great frequency of divorce.”

— Margaret Mead

108. “Men have always been afraid that women could get along without them.”

— Margaret Mead

109. “All of us who grew up before World War II are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before.”

— Margaret Mead

110. “Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform.”

— Margaret Mead

111. “And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.”

— Margaret Mead

112. “Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.”

— Margaret Mead

113. “Man’s role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.”

— Margaret Mead

114. “We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.”

— Margaret Mead

115. “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

116. “Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.”

— Margaret Mead

117. “Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.”

— Margaret Mead

118. “Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.”

— Margaret Mead

119. “I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.”

— Margaret Mead

120. “We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.”

— Margaret Mead

121. “The assumption that men were created equal, with an equal ability to make an effort and win an earthly reward, although denied every day by experience, is maintained every day by our folklore and our daydreams.”

— Margaret Mead

122. “Injustice experienced in the flesh, in deeply wounded flesh, is the stuff out of which change explodes.”

— Margaret Mead

123. “I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?”

— Margaret Mead

124. “Maleness in America is not absolutely defined; it has to be kept and re-earned every day, and one essential element in the definition is beating women in every game that both sexes play.”

— Margaret Mead

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

— Margaret Mead

126. “We need every human gift and cannot afford to neglect any gift because of artificial barriers of sex or race or class or national origin.”

— Margaret Mead

127. “In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present.”

— Margaret Mead

128. “In our contemporary world, no one can think or work with a single picture of what a family is. No one can fit all human behavior, all thought and feeling, into a single pattern.”

— Margaret Mead

129. “The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social.”

— Margaret Mead

130. “To the extent a person makes, invents or thinks something that is new to him, he may be said to have performed a creative act.”

— Margaret Mead

131. “The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown... The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers.”

— Margaret Mead

132. “Throughout history, females have picked providers for males. Males pick anything.”

— Margaret Mead

133. “Each suburban housewife spends her time presiding over a power plant sufficient to have staffed the palace of a Roman emperor with a hundred slaves.”

— Margaret Mead

134. “And as I had my father’s kind of mind-which was also his mother’s-I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.”

— Margaret Mead

135. “Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly...”

— Margaret Mead

136. “The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates.”

— Margaret Mead

137. “A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.”

— Margaret Mead

138. “The older child who has lost or broken some valuable thing will be found when his parents return, not run away, not willing to confess, but in a deep sleep The thief whose case is being tried falls asleep.”

— Margaret Mead

139. “Keeping even the most humble talent wrapped in a napkin becomes the more reprehensible the greater the emergency.”

— Margaret Mead

140. “Learned behaviors have replaced the biologically given ones.”

— Margaret Mead

141. “Leisure and the cultivation of human capacities are inextricably interdependent.”

— Margaret Mead

142. “The important thing about women today is, as they get older, they still keep house. It’s one reason why they don’t die, but men die when they retire. Women just polish the teacups.”

— Margaret Mead

143. “I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman.”

— Margaret Mead

144. “Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.”

— Margaret Mead

145. “The time has come, I think, when we must recognize bisexuality as a normal form of human behavior.”

— Margaret Mead

146. “The negative cautions of science are never popular.”

— Margaret Mead

147. “I think rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature.”

— Margaret Mead

148. “I had my father’s mind, but he had his mother’s mind. Fortunately, his mother lived with us and so I early realized that intellectual abilities of the kind I shared with my father and grandmother were not sex-linked.”

— Margaret Mead

149. “The liberals have not softened their view of actuality to make themselves live closer to the dream, but instead sharpen their perceptions and fight to make the dream actuality...”

— Margaret Mead

150. “Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn’t burn up any fossil fuel, doesn’t pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.”

— Margaret Mead