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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.

Margaret Mead

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 a clumsy, inept blunderer.
MARGARET MEAD

Believe Burden Satisfaction Sexuality Success Woman
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

Agreement Deal Myself People Respect
The ability to learn is older as it is also more widespread than is the ability to teach.
MARGARET MEAD

Ability Learning Old Teaching
Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.
MARGARET MEAD

Condition Cultural Human Nature Respond
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

Belief Future Hands Problem Technology War
What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love.
MARGARET MEAD

Awareness Capability Human Love Sexual Wide
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

Freedom Future Open Past People Support System Traditional Unknown
It is easier to change a man’s religion than to change his diet.
MARGARET MEAD

Change Diet Himself Man Religion
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 a better grasp of one’s subject matter.
MARGARET MEAD

Enough Intelligence Oneself State Understand
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.
MARGARET MEAD

Better Goodness Society Thinking
The negative cautions of science are never popular.
MARGARET MEAD

Caution Negative Popular Science
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

Accuracy Believe Information World
Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.
MARGARET MEAD

Country Feeling Parents Young
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.
MARGARET MEAD

Activity Crisis Development Discussion Exception Interest Mature Representation Stress
Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.
MARGARET MEAD

Life Philosophy Right Sarcasm Time
Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.
MARGARET MEAD

Believe Care Change People Power
The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as – carried too far – one of its weaknesses.
MARGARET MEAD

Anonymous Carry Strength Weakness
Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly.
MARGARET MEAD

Goodness Grace Group Live Pleasant Small
Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
MARGARET MEAD

Behavior Direct Humanity Inheritance Learning Series
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

Believe End Feed Reward Society Violence
Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.
MARGARET MEAD

Access Human Need Order
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.
MARGARET MEAD

Answer Country Listening Need Oneself Place Question Voice Wait
As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.
MARGARET MEAD

Appreciation Culture Home Knowledge Travel Wisdom
in all cultures, human beings – in order to be human – must understand the nonhuman.
MARGARET MEAD

Culture Human Order Understand
Be who you really are, do what you want to do, in order to have what you really want.
MARGARET MEAD

Order Yourself
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.
MARGARET MEAD

Body Emotion Movement Oneself Pattern Pleasant
For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen.
MARGARET MEAD

Conversation Deep Evolution Human Species

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Margaret Mead Quotes