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"Everything is grist for anthropology's mill."

"Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary. By a great effort man has hit upon a method of compensating himself for his basic inferiority. Equipped with various mysterious noise-makin…"

"What are the rewards of the tiny, ingrown, biological family opposing its closed circle of affection to a forbidding world of the strong ties between parent and children, ties which an active personal…"

"We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet."

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

"The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough … so that the male may in the course of his life reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement, of which his ch…"

"I learned the value of hard work by working hard."

"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 …"

"It has been a woman's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope. lf we are united, we may be able to produce a world in which our children and other people's chi…"

"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 ne…"

"No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back. You can get rid of it if you live in an enclave and keep everybody else out, and bring the children up to be unfit to live a…"

"Our young people are faced by a series of different groups which believe different things and advocate different practices, and to each of which some trusted friend or relative may belong. So a girl's…"

"Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform."

"Each man's place in the social scheme of his village is know; the contribution which he must make to the work and ceremonial of the village and the share of the whole which he will receive back again …"

"No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation. We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as…"

"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…"

"How are men and women to think about their maleness and their femaleness in this twentieth century, in which so many of our old ideas must be made new? Have we over-domesticated men, denied their natu…"

"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."

"What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things."

"Female animals defending their young are notoriously ferocious and lack the playful delight in combat which characterizes the mock combats of males of the same species. There seems very little ground …"

"I think extreme heterosexuality is a perversion."

"Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents."

"During the last hundred years parents and teachers have ceased to take childhood and adolescence for granted. They have attempted to fit education to the needs of the child, rather than to press the c…"

"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 intere…"

"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 re…"

"To cherish the life of the world."

"Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcen…"

"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 humour, which has an intellectua…"

"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 …"

"I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples — faraway peoples — so that Americans might better understand themselves."

"The Institute for Intercultural Studies - ethnographic institute founded by Mead, with resources relating to Mead's work"

"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 ar…"

"The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society."

"translate aspects of culture never successfully recorded by the scientist, although often caught by the artist, into some form of communication sufficiently clear and sufficiently unequivocal to satis…"

"The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for…"

"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."

"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 Google Scholar profile"

"A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again."

"In this book I am concerned with certain kinds of communication: communication between parents and children, between associates of the same status, between members of different societies and, through …"

"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."

"The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a con…"

"placid and contented, unaggressive and noninitiatory, noncompetitive and responsive, warm, docile, and trusting."

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

"Today, as we are coming to understand better the circular processes through which culture is developed and transmitted, we recognize that man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, w…"

"Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire."

"Envy of the male role can come as much from an undervaluation of the role of wife and mother as from an overvaluation of the public aspects of achievement that have been reserved for men."

"If a society insists that warfare is the major occupation for the male sex, it is therefore insisting that all male children display bravery and pugnacity. Even if the insistence upon the differential…"

"The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today."

"A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know."

"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."

"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…"

"Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions."

"… Her aunt is an agnostic, an ardent advocate of women's rights, an internationalist who rests all her hopes on Esperanto, is devoted to Bernard Shaw, and spends her spare time in campaigns of anti-vi…"

"Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man."

"If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life."

"I think it was my grandmother who gave me my ease in being a woman. She was unquestionably feminine — small and dainty and pretty and wholly without masculine protest or feminist aggrievement. She had…"

"The student of culture is concerned with a characteristic which man displays more markedly than any other known creature — the ability to transmit what he has learned. In following the procedure I sug…"

"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 peo…"

"Learned behaviors have replaced the biologically given ones."