Margaret Mead

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

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.

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

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.

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.

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

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

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

Each suburban housewife spends her time presiding over a power plant sufficient to have staffed the palace of a Roman emperor with a hundred slaves.

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

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

In almost any society I think the quality of the non-conformists is like to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.

We make our own criminals and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.

You just have to learn not to care about the dust mites under the beds.

Jealousy is not a barometer by which the depth of love can be read. It merely records the degree of the lover's insecurity.

No matter how many communes anybody invents the family always creeps back.