Margaret Mead Quotes

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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
Nature

"Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have."

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

"Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man."

"Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents."

"Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess."
Science

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

"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."

"Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law."

"I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world."

"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."
Age

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

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

"We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet."

"Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited."

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

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

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

"What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things."

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