Margaret Mead quotes

“It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.”

— Margaret Mead

“It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.”

— Margaret Mead

“Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.”

— Margaret Mead

“Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.”

— Margaret Mead

“Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.”

— Margaret Mead

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

— Margaret Mead

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

— Margaret Mead

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

— Margaret Mead

“Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.”

— Margaret Mead

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

— Margaret Mead

“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.”

— Margaret Mead

“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.”

— Margaret Mead

“The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one's mind.”

— Margaret Mead