Top 180 Margaret Mead Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period when this was not so. We know of no people who have succeeded for long in dissolving the family or displacing it.”

— Margaret Mead

152. “Man’s most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.”

— Margaret Mead

153. “Because of their age long training in human relations for that is what feminine intuition really is women have a special contribution to make any group enterprise.”

— Margaret Mead

154. “The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.”

— Margaret Mead

155. “We grow up never questioning that which is unquestioned around us.”

— Margaret Mead

156. “Pigs and cows and chickens and people are all competing for grain.”

— Margaret Mead

157. “In this country, some people start being miserable about growing old while they are still young.”

— Margaret Mead

158. “In almost any society I think, the quality of the nonconformists is likely to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.”

— Margaret Mead

159. “Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.”

— Margaret Mead

160. “The closest friends I made all through life have been people who also grew up close to a loved and loving grandmother or grandfather.”

— Margaret Mead

161. “The ability to learn is older as it is also more widespread than is the ability to teach.”

— Margaret Mead

162. “If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.”

— Margaret Mead

163. “We must bear in mind the possibility that the greater opportunities open in the twentieth century to women may be quite withdrawn, and that we may return to stricter regimentation of women...”

— Margaret Mead

164. “We – mankind – stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device – our consciousness of the crisis – as our unique contribution.”

— Margaret Mead

165. “There is no lonelier person than the one who lives with a spouse with whom he or she cannot communicate.”

— Margaret Mead

166. “In each age there is a series of pressing questions which must be asked and answered. On the correctness of the questions depends the survival of those who ask; on the quality of the answers depends the quality of the life those survivors will lead.”

— Margaret Mead

167. “Envy of the male role can come as much from an undervaluation of the role of wife and mother as from an overvaluation of the public aspects of achievement that have been reserved for men.”

— Margaret Mead

168. “Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.”

— Margaret Mead

169. “The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature.”

— Margaret Mead

170. “When I stand on a street in a Canadian city and look across the street, it couldn’t be anywhere but Canada, but how can I prove it?”

— Margaret Mead

171. “We will be a better country when each religious group can trust its members to obey the dictates of their own religious faith without assistance from the legal structure of the country.”

— Margaret Mead

172. “Too many people, when they reject God, go on believing in the devil. Many intellectuals have a sense of evil without a confidence in good.”

— Margaret Mead

173. “Through a grandmother’s voice and hands the end of life is known at the beginning.”

— Margaret Mead

174. “Cynicism is the other thing that goes with sentimentality...”

— Margaret Mead

175. “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

176. “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

177. “The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society.”

— Margaret Mead

178. “If we make one criterion for defining the artist the impulse to make something new, or to do something in a new way – a kind of divine discontent with all that has gone before, however good – then we can find such artists at every level of human culture, even when performing acts of great simplicity.”

— Margaret Mead

179. “You just have to learn not to care about the dusty mites under the beds.”

— Margaret Mead

180. “I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.”

— Margaret Mead

181. “If sports are the toy department of life, then the NFL is the FAO Schwartz of sports.”

— Margaret Mead

182. “I devoutly believe that there is no difficulty between two people for which both are not responsible.”

— Margaret Mead

183. “One characteristic of Americans is that they have no toleration at all of anybody putting up with anything. We believe that whatever is going wrong ought to be fixed.”

— Margaret Mead

184. “Britons put up with, Americans fix, Canadians cope.”

— Margaret Mead

185. “Contentment can be bought at a price that one can not possibly pay.”

— Margaret Mead

186. “An occupation that has no basis in sex-determined gifts can now recruit its ranks from twice as many potential artists.”

— Margaret Mead

187. “It is typical, in America, that a person’s hometown is not the place where he is living now but is the place he left behind.”

— Margaret Mead

188. “It is of very doubtful value to enlist the gifts of a woman into fields that have been defined as male; it frightens the men, unsexes the women, and muffles and distorts the contribution women could make.”

— Margaret Mead

189. “We end up with the contradictory picture of a society that appears to throw its doors wide open to women, but translates her every step towards success as having been damaging.”

— Margaret Mead

190. “Creationism: the theory that Rome was built in a day.”

— Margaret Mead

191. “You can never have a relationship with someone whose smell you don’t like.”

— Margaret Mead

192. “Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.”

— Margaret Mead

193. “Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.”

— Margaret Mead

194. “Sometimes, instead of helping people to advance, a discovery or an invention holds them back.”

— Margaret Mead

195. “Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression.”

— Margaret Mead