Margaret Mead Quotes

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

~ Margaret Mead

There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing...when we save our children, we save ourselves

~ Margaret Mead

It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.

~ Margaret Mead

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

~ 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

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

~ Margaret Mead

Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.

~ Margaret Mead

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal an get away with it.

~ 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

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

~ Margaret Mead

There is no reason to think a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens cannot change the world; Indeed, that's the only thing that ever has.

~ Margaret Mead

A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.'- James Baldwin

~ Margaret Mead

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

~ 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

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

No matter how many communes anybody invents the family always creeps back.

~ Margaret Mead

In almost any society I think the quality of the non-conformists is like to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

~ 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

I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don't agree with or like.

~ Margaret Mead

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

~ Margaret Mead

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.

~ Margaret Mead

Anthropology demands 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

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

Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.

~ 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

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

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

~ Margaret Mead

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

~ Margaret Mead

Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.

~ Margaret Mead

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

~ Margaret Mead

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.

~ Margaret Mead

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

Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.

~ Margaret Mead

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

~ 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

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

~ Margaret Mead

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

~ Margaret Mead