Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Barnard College in New York City and her MA and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. Mead served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975. These Margaret Mead quotes will inspire you.
Best Margaret Mead Quotes
- “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “Where we choose to put our attention changes our brain, which in time can change how we see and interact with the world.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “There is no lonelier person than the one who lives with a spouse with whom he or she cannot communicate.” ~ Margaret Mead
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“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “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.” ~ Margaret Mead
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“I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “They need to find meaning…is as real as the need for trust and for love, for relations with other human beings.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention.” ~ Margaret Mead
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“For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “Human beings do not carry civilization in their genes. All that we do carry in our genes are certain capacities- the capacity to learn to walk upright, to use our brains, to speak, to relate to our fellow men, to construct and use tools, to explore the universe, and to express that exploration in religion, in art, in science, in philosophy.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “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
- “Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “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
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“You can never have a relationship with someone whose smell you don’t like.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “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
- “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
- “The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.” ~ Margaret Mead
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“It is easier to change a man’s religion than to change his diet.” ~ 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.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “The assumption that men and woman are essentially alike in all respects, or even in the most important ones, is a damaging one, as damaging as the assumption that they are different in ways in which they aren’t different, perhaps more so.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “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
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“Be who you really are, do what you want to do, in order to have what you really want.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups or between groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to be run. If you look back, you will see that warfare was an invention, just as ways of handling government or taxes are inventions. You will see, too, that once people use an invention they go on using it until they find another which they think is superior.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “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
- “You know you love someone when you cannot put into words how they make you feel.” ~ Margaret Mead
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“Through a grandmother’s voice and hands, the end of life is known at the beginning.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “Of course we need children! Adults need children in their lives to listen to and care for, to keep their imagination fresh and their hearts young and to make the future a reality for which they are willing to work.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humor, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man” ~ Margaret Mead
- “In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people’s lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world” ~ Margaret Mead
- “What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “There are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing.” ~ Margaret Mead
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“We grow up never questioning that which is unquestioned around us.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “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
- “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
- “Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we’ve lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it’s the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit, we need groups, tribes.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “We are living beyond our means. As a people, we have developed a lifestyle 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.” ~ Margaret Mead
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“I learned the value of hard work by working hard.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary… to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “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
- “There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a postmenopausal woman.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “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
- “Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.” ~ Margaret Mead
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“An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift” ~ Margaret Mead
- “Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “…recognize and respect Earth’s beautiful systems of balance, between the presence of animals on land, the fish in the sea, birds in the air, mankind, water, air, and land. Most importantly there must always be awareness of the actions by people that can disturb this precious balance.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.” ~ Margaret Mead
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“To demand that another love what one loves is tyranny enough, but to demand that another hate what one hates, is even worse.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “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
- “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
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“Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “I have been accused of having believed when I wrote Sex and Temperament that there are no sex differences… This, many readers felt, was too much. It was too pretty. I must have found what I was looking for. But this misconception comes from a lack of understanding of what anthropology means, of the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder, that which one would not have been able to guess.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “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.” ~ Margaret Mead
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“The atmosphere is the key symbol of global interdependence.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “The most intractable problem today is not pollution or technology or war, but the lack of belief that the future is very much in the hands of the individual.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it, or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, ‘Does he have to be old?” ~ Margaret Mead
- “I discovered when I had a child of my own that I had become a biased observer of small children. Instead of looking at them with affectionate but nonpartisan eyes, I saw each of them as older or younger, bigger or smaller, more or less graceful, intelligent, or skilled than my own child.” ~ Margaret Mead
