Quotes from Margaret Mead

There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing...when we save our children, we save ourselves

Throughout history, females have picked providers for males. Males pick anything.

Each suburban housewife spends her time presiding over a power plant sufficient to have staffed the palace of a Roman emperor with a hundred slaves.

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.

Men have always been afraid that women could get along without them.

It has been a woman's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope.

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.

Women have an important contribution to make.

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

We must bear in mind the possibility that the greater opportunities open in the twentieth century to women may be quite withdrawn, and that we may return to stricter regimentation of women.

We have nowhere else to go... this is all we have.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.

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

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

Sisters is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.

In our contemporary world, no one can think or work with a single picture of what a family is. No one can fit all human behavior, all thought and feeling, into a single pattern.

Grandparents are given a second chance to enjoy parenthood with fewer of its tribulations and anxieties.

Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman. And as I had my father's kind of mind-which was also his mother's-I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.

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

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.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.