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Margaret Mead Quotes - Page 8

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

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

Margaret Mead
Relationship, Family, Sister
Attributed to Margaret Mead in Ellyn Sanna "Sisters by Birth Friends by Choice: All the Things I Love About You", June 2003.

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

Margaret Mead
Women, Males, Female

Wonder is very important, because if we never wondered, we would never get to the point of asking questions. Yet wonder may lead people to write poetry or to paint pictures or to pray, as well as to ask the kinds of questions about the world and themselves that can be answered by science.

Margaret Mead
Writing, Asking Questions, People
MARGARET MEAD (1959). “PEOPLE AND PLACES”

An education not founded on Art will never succeed.

Margaret Mead
Art, Succeed

If I were to be taken hostage, I would not plead for release nor would I want my government to be blackmailed. I think certain government officials, industrialists and celebrated persons should make it clear they are prepared to be sacrificed if taken hostage. If that were done, what gain would there be for terrorists in taking hostages?

Margaret Mead
Taken, Thinking, Government

And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.

Margaret Mead
Baby, Soulmate, Struggle

[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
Long Ago, Movement, Body
Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead (1942). “Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis”

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
Mother, Sex, Father
Margaret Mead, Rhoda Bubendey Métraux (1979). “Margaret Mead, some personal views”, Angus & Robertson

Leisure and the cultivation of human capacities are inextricably interdependent.

Margaret Mead
Leisure, Capacity, Cultivation
Margaret Mead, Rhoda Bubendey Métraux (1979). “Margaret Mead, some personal views”, Angus & Robertson

Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space.

Margaret Mead
Integrity, Ocean, Communication

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
Space, Together, Attention

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.

Margaret Mead
Family, Thinking, Feelings
Margaret Mead (1965). “Family”

I don't consider my marriages as failures! It's idiotic to assume that because a marriage ends, it's failed.

Margaret Mead
Divorce, Assuming, Ends

I devoutly believe that there is no difficulty between two people for which both are not responsible.

Margaret Mead
Believe, Responsibility, Two
Margaret Mead, Margaret Mary Caffrey, Patricia A. Francis (2006). “To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead”, p.191, Basic Books

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

Margaret Mead
Air, Way, Metamorphosis

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

Margaret Mead
Progress, Twenties, Wells
"Margaret Mead: A Life". Book by Jane Howard, 1984.

Both men and women are conceived as merely capable of response to a situation that their society has already defined for them as sexual, and so the Arapesh feel that it is necessary to chaperon betrothed couples who are too young... with their definition of sex as a response to an external situation rather than as spontaneous desire, both men and women are regarded as helpless in the face of seduction. Parents warn their sons even more than they warn their daughters against permitting themselves to get into situations in which someone can make love to them.

Margaret Mead
Daughter, Sex, Couple
"Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies". Book by Margaret Mead, 1935.

Just as the difference in height between males is no longer a realistic issue, now that lawsuits have been substituted for hand-to-hand encounters, so the difference in strength between men and women is no longer worth elaboration in cultural institutions.

Margaret Mead
Men, Hands, Differences
Margaret Mead (1963). “Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies”

to the extent that either sex is disadvantaged, the whole culture is poorer, and the sex that, superficially, inherits the earth, inherits only a very partial legacy. The more whole the culture, the more whole each member, each man, each woman, each child will be.

Margaret Mead
Sex, Children, Equality
Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

Pigs and cows and chickens and people are all competing for grain.

Margaret Mead
Nature, Pigs, People

Any town that doesn't have sidewalks doesn't love its children.

Margaret Mead
Children, Towns, Sidewalk

In each age there is a series of pressing questions which must be asked and answered. On the correctness of the questions depends the survival of those who ask; on the quality of the answers depends the quality of the life those survivors will lead.

Margaret Mead
Survival, Age, Quality

This is a precious possession which we cannot afford to tarnish, but society always is attempting to make the physician into a killer to kill the defective child at birth, to leave the sleeping pills beside the bed of the cancer patient ... It is the duty of society to protect the physicians from such requests.

Margaret Mead
Children, Cancer, Sleep

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

Margaret Mead
Life, Jumping, Firsts
MARGARET MEAD (1959). “PEOPLE AND PLACES”

Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention

Margaret Mead
Mother, Father, Women