88 quotes
I think extreme heterosexuality is a perversion.
Open Minds: Exploring Global Issues Through Reading and Discussion (1996)
People are still encouraged to marry as if they could count on marriage being for life, and at the same time they are absorbing a knowledge of the great frequency of divorce.
Male and Female (1949)
[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.
Balinese Character (1942)
The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society.
Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
Familiar Medical Quotations (1968)
Everything is grist for anthropology's mill.
There is no necessary connection between warfare and human nature. Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.
And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942)
It seems to me very important to continue to distinguish between two evils. It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
Margaret Mead : Some Personal Views (1979)
I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
Psychology (1990)
I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.
The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature.
Male and Female (1949)
Envy of the male role can come as much from an undervaluation of the role of wife and mother as from an overvaluation of the public aspects of achievement that have been reserved for men.
Male and Female (1949)
Throughout history, females have picked providers for mates. Males pick anything.
The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.
Educational Psychology (2000)
It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.
American Quotations (1992)
We will be a better country when each religious group can trust its members to obey the dictates of their own religious faith without assistance from the legal structure of their country.
Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (1979)
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.
Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
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.
Culture and Commitment : A Study of the Generation Gap (1970)
Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
to Mead in: Fleur L. Strand (1978)
Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.