353 Quotes by Margaret Mead

[In Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.

We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.

I had my father's mind, but he had his mother's mind. Fortunately, his mother lived with us and so I early realized that intellectual abilities of the kind I shared with my father and grandmother were not sex-linked.

For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections.

A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.

If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.

We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.

The ability to learn is older as it is also more widespread than is the ability to teach.

Women have an important contribution to make.