Margaret Mead

The problem with America today is that too many people know too much about not enough.

— Margaret Mead

today's children are the first generation to grow up in a world that has the power to destroy itself.

— Margaret Mead

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

— Margaret Mead

The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it alone

— Margaret Mead

Loving you is just like breathing, as effortless, and as lovely.

— Margaret Mead

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

— Margaret Mead

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

— Margaret Mead

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

— 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

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

— Margaret Mead

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

— 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

[In Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long…

— 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…

— Margaret Mead

If man has not found ways to deal with environmental problems such as water and air pollution by 1998, it will be…

— Margaret Mead

Between friends there is no bribery. ... the relationship of friends is intrinsically fair and equal. Neither feels stronger or more clever…

— Margaret Mead

Wonder is very important, because if we never wondered, we would never get to the point of asking questions. Yet wonder may…

— Margaret Mead

If I were to be taken hostage, I would not plead for release nor would I want my government to be blackmailed.…

— Margaret Mead

Mourning has become unfashionable in the United States. The bereaved are supposed to pull themselves together as quickly as possible and to…

— 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…

— Margaret Mead

The first step in the direction of a world rule of law is the recognition that peace no longer is an unobtainable…

— Margaret Mead

No matter how free divorce, how frequently marriages break up, in most societies there is the assumption of permanent mating, of the…

— Margaret Mead

As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period when this was…

— Margaret Mead

Mead's anthropology had many other red, white and blue- blooded virtues. One was the common anthropological conceit, out of which she made…

— 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…

— Margaret Mead

If they learn easily, they are penalized for being bored when they have nothing to do; if they excel in some outstanding…

— Margaret Mead

Many people are shrinking from the future and from participation in the movement toward a new, expanded reality. And, like homesick travelers…

— Margaret Mead

Anthropology... has always been highly dependent upon photography... As the use of still photography - and moving pictures - has become increasingly…

— Margaret Mead

The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates. Not…

— Margaret Mead

The suffering of either sex - of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to…

— Margaret Mead

where families suffer from disasters that are preventable, this is a measure of a whole nation's neglect. A society imperils its own…

— Margaret Mead

Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations…

— Margaret Mead

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

— Margaret Mead

WE MUST DEVISE A SYSTEM IN WHICH PEACE IS MORE REWARDING THAN WAR.

— Margaret Mead

The time has come, I think, when we must recognize bisexuality as a normal form of human behavior.

— Margaret Mead

We women are doing pretty well. We're almost back to where we were in the twenties.

— Margaret Mead

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

— Margaret Mead

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

— Margaret Mead

The atmosphere is the key symbol of global interdependence.

— Margaret Mead

Injustice experienced in the flesh, in deeply wounded flesh, is the stuff out of which change explodes.

— Margaret Mead