Margaret Mead quotes - page 7

The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer. (Margaret Mead)
We need every human gift and cannot afford to neglect any gift because of artificial barriers of sex or race or class or national origin.
Margaret Mead
When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed.
Margaret Mead
Pigs and cows and chickens and people are all competing for grain.
Margaret Mead
The suffering of either sex -- of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult -- this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change.
Margaret Mead
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
I've been married three times -- and each time I married the right person.
Margaret Mead
The liberals have not softened their view of actuality to make themselves live closer to the dream, but instead sharpen their perceptions and fight to make the dream actuality or give up the battle in despair.
Margaret Mead
Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
Margaret Mead
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
Each home has been reduced to the bare essentials -- to barer essentials than most primitive people would consider possible. Only one woman's hands to feed the baby, answer the telephone, turn off the gas under the pot that is boiling over, soothe the older child who has broken a toy, and open both doors at once. She is a nutritionist, a child psychologist, an engineer, a production manager, an expert buyer, all in one. Her husband sees her as free to plan her own time, and envies her she sees him as having regular hours and envies him. (Margaret Mead)
The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates. Not only does he picture us caught in a tremendous man-made or God-made trap from which there is no escape, but we must also listen to him day in, day out, describe how the trap is inexorably closing. To such prophecies the human race, as presently bred and educated and situated, is incapable of listening. So some dance and some immolate themselves as human torches some take drugs and some artists spill their creativity in sets of randomly placed dots on a white ground.
Margaret Mead
Some veil between childhood and the present is necessary. If the veil is withdrawn, the artistic imagination sickens and dies, the prophet looks in the mirror with a disillusioned and cynical sneer, the scientist goes fishing.
Margaret Mead
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.
Margaret Mead
Because of their age long training in human relations for that is what feminine intuition really is women have a special contribution to make any group enterprise.
Margaret Mead