353 Quotes by 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.

Wonder is very important, because if we never wondered, we would never get to the point of asking questions. Yet wonder may lead people to write poetry or to paint pictures or to pray, as well as to ask the kinds of questions about the world and themselves that can be answered by science.

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

There is no lonelier person than the one who lives with a spouse with whom he or she cannot communicate.

Even very recently, the elders could say: 'You know, I have been young and you never have been old.' But today's young people can reply: 'You never have been young in the world I am young in, and you never can be.' ... the older generation will never see repeated in the lives of young people their own unprecedented experience of sequentially emerging change. This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to cooperate

The protection of a ten-year-old girl from her father's advances is a necessary condition of social order, but the protection of the father from temptation is a necessary condition of his continued social adjustment. The protections that are built up in the child against desire for the parent become the essential counterpart to the attitudes in the parent that protect the child.

There is no more creative force in the world than the menopausal woman with zest.

we came to realize that a civilization which rode roughshod over the way of life of other peoples was incorporating evil in its own way of life.