Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Margaret Mead Anthropologist

  • Gender: Female
  • Citizenship: United States
  • Born: Dec 16, 1901
  • Died: Nov 15, 1978

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured author and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor degree at Barnard College in New York City, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.

She was both a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and Western culture and a respected, often controversial, academic anthropologist. Her reports about the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures shaped the 1960s sexual revolution. Mead was a proponent of broadening sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.

An Anglican Christian, she played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.

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

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

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

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

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

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

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