Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
MARGARET MEADHuman beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.
More Margaret Mead Quotes
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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 people all around the world.
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What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love.
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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.
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No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.
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Grandparents are given a second chance to enjoy parenthood with fewer of its tribulations and anxieties.
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Children not only have to learn what their parents learned in school, but also have to learn how to learn. This has to be recognized as a new problem which is only partly solved.
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The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one’s mind.
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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.
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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.
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What we lack is not so much leisure to do as time to reflect and time to feel. What we seldom “take” is time to experience the things that have happened, the things that are happening, the things that are still ahead of us.
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Warfare is just an invention, older and more widespread than the jury system, but none the less an invention.
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We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.
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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.
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We – mankind – stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device – our consciousness of the crisis – as our unique contribution.
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A small group of thoughtful people could change the world.
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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.
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Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.
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Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.
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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.
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.
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We end up with the contradictory picture of a society that appears to throw its doors wide open to women, but translates her every step towards success as having been damaging.
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An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift.
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One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it.
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Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.
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There is no more creative force in the world than the menopausal woman with zest.
MARGARET MEAD -
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