Quotes from Margaret Mead

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don't agree with or like.

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

The mind is not sex-typed.

As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.

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

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.

Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention.

Our treatment of both older people and children reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, Go to sleep by yourselves. And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.

People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.

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

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

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 a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.

The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it alone.

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a lifestyle 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.

Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.

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.

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 something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have. We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.

The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown... The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers.

Women have an important contribution to make.

Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible.

The notion that we are products of our environment is our greatest sin; we are products of our choices." Margaret Mead (this may not be her exact wording, but it's close enough).