Margaret Mead
For art to be reality, the whole sensuous being must be caught up in the experience.Collection: Art
No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.Collection: Family
The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates.Collection: Alternatives
Many women, particularly young women, have claimed the right to use the most explicit sex terms, including extremely vulgar ones, in public as well as private. But it is men, far more than women, who have been liberated by this change. For now that women use these terms, men no longer need to watch their own language in the presence of women. But is this a gain for women?Collection: Sex
Dancing is the only activity in which almost all ages and both sexes participate.Collection: Sex
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?Collection: Cities
Keeping even the most humble talent wrapped in a napkin becomes the more reprehensible the greater the emergency.Collection: Humble
Britons put up with, Americans fix, Canadians copeCollection: Britons
We must bear in mind the possibility that the greater opportunities open in the twentieth century to women may be quite withdrawn, and that we may return to stricter regimentation of women.Collection: Opportunity
the task of each family is also the task of all humanity. This is to cherish the living, remember those who have gone before, and prepare for those who are not yet born.Collection: Family
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.Collection: Family
... some veil between childhood and the present is necessary. If the veil is withdrawn, the artistic imagination sickens and dies, the prophet looks in the mirror with a disillusioned and cynical sneer, the scientist goes fishing.Collection: Mirrors
Creationism: the theory that Rome was built in a day.Collection: Rome
I approached the idea of college with the expectation of taking part in an intellectual feast. ... In college, in some way that I devoutly believed in but could not explain, I expected to become a person.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Children
The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society.Collection: Law
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?Collection: Civilization
When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Roots
I learned to observe the world around me, and to note what I sawCollection: World
A society which is clamouring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Stress
I don't consider my marriages as failures! It's idiotic to assume that because a marriage ends, it's failed.Collection: Divorce
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.Collection: Mother
Leisure and the cultivation of human capacities are inextricably interdependent.Collection: Leisure
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.Collection: Family
I devoutly believe that there is no difficulty between two people for which both are not responsible.Collection: Believe
Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space.Collection: Integrity
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.Collection: Space
We women are doing pretty well. We're almost back to where we were in the twenties.Collection: Progress
No skill, no special aptitude, no vividness of imagination or precision of thinking would go unrecognized because the child who possessed it was of one sex rather than the other. No child would be relentlessly shaped to one pattern of behavior, but instead there should be many patterns, in a world that had learned to allow to each individual the pattern which was most congenial to his gifts.Collection: Sex
Both men and women are conceived as merely capable of response to a situation that their society has already defined for them as sexual, and so the Arapesh feel that it is necessary to chaperon betrothed couples who are too young... with their definition of sex as a response to an external situation rather than as spontaneous desire, both men and women are regarded as helpless in the face of seduction. Parents warn their sons even more than they warn their daughters against permitting themselves to get into situations in which someone can make love to them.Collection: Daughter
Just as the difference in height between males is no longer a realistic issue, now that lawsuits have been substituted for hand-to-hand encounters, so the difference in strength between men and women is no longer worth elaboration in cultural institutions.Collection: Men
Any town that doesn't have sidewalks doesn't love its children.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Survival
This is a precious possession which we cannot afford to tarnish, but society always is attempting to make the physician into a killer to kill the defective child at birth, to leave the sleeping pills beside the bed of the cancer patient ... It is the duty of society to protect the physicians from such requests.Collection: Children
The time has come, I think, when we must recognize bisexuality as a normal form of human behavior... we shall not really succeed in discarding the straitjacket of our cultural beliefs about sexual choice if we fail to come to terms with the well-documented, normal human capacity to love members of both sexes.Collection: Sex
Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social inventionCollection: Mother
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.Collection: Men
In contrast to our own social environment which brings out different aspects of human nature and often demonstrated that behavior which occurs almost invariably in individuals within our society is nevertheless due not to original nature but to social environment; and a homogeneous and simple development of the individual may be studied.Collection: Simple
[Partly as a consequence of male authority] prestige value always attaches to the activities of men.Collection: Men
[In Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.Collection: Long Ago
today's children are the first generation to grow up in a world that has the power to destroy itself.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Thinking
[Among the Arapeh... both father and mother are held responsible for child care by the entire community...] If one comments upon a middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer: 'Good-looking? Ye-e-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all those children'.Collection: Mother
Wonder is very important, because if we never wondered, we would never get to the point of asking questions. Yet wonder may lead people to write poetry or to paint pictures or to pray, as well as to ask the kinds of questions about the world and themselves that can be answered by science.Collection: Writing
The protection of a ten-year-old girl from her father's advances is a necessary condition of social order, but the protection of the father from temptation is a necessary condition of his continued social adjustment. The protections that are built up in the child against desire for the parent become the essential counterpart to the attitudes in the parent that protect the child.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Sex
Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform.Collection: Sex