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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

The need to find meaning is as real as the need for trust and for love, for relations with other human beings.
MARGARET MEAD

Finding Human Meaning Need Reality Relationship Trust
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
Injustice experienced in the flesh, in deeply wounded flesh, is the stuff out of which change explodes.
MARGARET MEAD

Change Experience Explode Justice Wound
We – mankind – stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device – our consciousness of the crisis – as our unique contribution.
MARGARET MEAD

Consciousness Crisis Evolution Kind Man Ourselves Unique
Human 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.
MARGARET MEAD

Culture Delight Hold Human Identity Learning Pleasure
It was not until we saw the picture of the earth, from the moon, that we realized how small and how helpless this planet is – something that we must hold in our arms and care for.
MARGARET MEAD

Care Earth Moon Ourselves Photograph Planet Realize
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
There is no more creative force in the world than the menopausal woman with zest.
MARGARET MEAD

Creative Force Woman Zeal
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
Don’t depend on governments or corporations to fix problems. Social revolutions are led by passionate individuals and that’s what makes the difference.
MARGARET MEAD

Corporation Difference Government Passionate Problem
WE MUST DEVISE A SYSTEM IN WHICH PEACE IS MORE REWARDING THAN WAR.
MARGARET MEAD

Peace Reward System War
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
MARGARET MEAD

Healing Self Love Unique Yourself
Sometimes, instead of helping people to advance, a discovery or an invention holds them back.
MARGARET MEAD

Help Invention People Time
Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.
MARGARET MEAD

Guilty People Sleep Young
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

Family Impossible Relative Situation Support
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

Change Citizenship Doubt Small Thinking

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Margaret Mead Quotes