Margaret Mead
No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.Collection: Children
Somehow, we have to get older people back close to growing children if we are to restore a sense of community, acquire knowledge of the past, and provide a sense of the future.Collection: Children
Where we choose to put our attention changes our brain, which in time can change how we see and interact with the world.Collection: Brain
Humanity . . . lies in man's capacity to question the known and imagine the unknown.Collection: Lying
Even very recently, the elders could say: 'You know, I have been young and you never have been old.' But today's young people can reply: 'You never have been young in the world I am young in, and you never can be.' ... the older generation will never see repeated in the lives of young people their own unprecedented experience of sequentially emerging change. This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.Collection: People
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.Collection: Country
We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.Collection: Inspirational
Those social behaviors which automatically preclude the building of a democratic world must go - every social limitation of human beings in terms of heredity, whether it be of race, or sex, or class. Every social institution which teaches human beings to cringe to those above and step on those below must be replaced by institutions which teach people to look each other straight in the face.Collection: Sex
Sometimes, instead of helping people to advance, a discovery or an invention holds them back.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Funny
Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly.Collection: Manners
You know you love someone when you cannot put into words how they make you feel.Collection: Feels
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.Collection: Believe
I've been married three times - and each time I married the right person.Collection: Marriage
Loving you is just like breathing, as effortless, and as lovely.Collection: Breathing
Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.Collection: Grandma
The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as - carried too far - one of its weaknesses.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Education
There is no more creative force in the world than the menopausal woman with zest.Collection: Zest
Our treatment of both older people and children reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, 'Go to sleep by yourselves.' And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.Collection: Children
the people of one nation alone cannot save their own children; each holds the responsibility for the others' children.Collection: Children
Between friends there is no bribery. ... the relationship of friends is intrinsically fair and equal. Neither feels stronger or more clever or more beautiful than the other.Collection: Friends
Jealousy is not a barometer by which the depth of love can be read. It merely records the degree of the lover's insecurity.Collection: Jealousy
It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.Collection: Inspirational
When a person is born we rejoice, and when they're married we jubilate, but when they die we try to pretend nothing has happened.Collection: Grief
Anthropology... has always been highly dependent upon photography... As the use of still photography - and moving pictures - has become increasingly essential as a part of anthropological methods, the need for photographers with a disciplined knowledge of anthropology and for anthropologists with training in photography has increased. We expect that in the near future sophisticated training in photography will be a requirement for all anthropologists. (1962)Collection: Photography
Orientation in time, space, and status are the essentials of social existence, and the Balinese, although they make very strong spirits for ceremonial occasions, with a few startling exceptions resist alcohol, because if one drinks one loses one's orientation. Orientation is felt as a protection rather than as a strait jacket and its loss provokes extreme anxiety.Collection: Strong
Warfare ... is just an invention, older and more widespread than the jury system, but none the less an invention.Collection: War
Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.Collection: Country
Pigs and cows and chickens and people are all competing for grain.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Divorce
I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples - faraway peoples - so that Americans might better understand themselves.Collection: Might
I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.Collection: Grandparent
American society is very like a fish society. . . . Among certain species of fish, the only thing which determines order of dominance is length of time in the fishbowl. The oldest resident picks on the newest resident, and if the newest resident is removed to a new bowl, he, as oldest resident, will pick on the newcomers.Collection: Order
Women have an important contribution to make.Collection: Important
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.Collection: Mother
The suffering of either sex - of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult - this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change.Collection: Strong
Love is the invention of a few high cultures ... it is cultural artifact. To make love the requirement of a lifelong marriage is exceedingly difficult, and only a few people can achieve it. I don't believe in setting universal standards that a large proportion of people can't reach.Collection: Love
War is only an invention, not a biological necessity.Collection: War
From a hundred cultures, [there is] one culture which does what no culture has ever done before-gives a place to every human gift.Collection: Giving
The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it aloneCollection: United States
EARTH DAY reminds the people of the world of the need for continuing care which is vital to Earth's safety.Collection: People
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.Collection: Class
I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman.Collection: Doubt
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.Collection: Children
A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.Collection: Men
Because our civilization is woven of so many diverse strands, the ideas which any one group accepts will be found to contain numerous contradictions.Collection: Civilization