353 Quotes by Margaret Mead

My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.

Many people are shrinking from the future and from participation in the movement toward a new, expanded reality. And, like homesick travelers abroad, they are focusing their anxieties on home. The reasons are not far to seek. We are at a turning point in human history. . . . We could turn our attention to the problems that going to the Moon certainly will not solve ... But I think this would be fatal to our future. . . . A society that no longer moves forward does not merely stagnate; it begins to die.

as the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep,so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily , to appreciate more lovingly , our own.

Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.

One characteristic of Americans is that they have no toleration at all of anybody putting up with anything. We believe that whatever is going wrong ought to be fixed.

No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation. We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have. We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.

Somehow, we have to get older people back close to growing children if we are to restore a sense of community, acquire knowledge of the past, and provide a sense of the future.

I don't consider my marriages as failures! It's idiotic to assume that because a marriage ends, it's failed.

there are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing.