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Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.

Margaret Mead

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Margaret Mead
Age: 76 †
Born: 1901
Born: December 16
Died: 1978
Died: November 15
Anthropologist
Cultural Anthropologist
Curator
Film Director
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Later
Dies
Going
Retire
Retired
Retiring
Sooner
Retirement

More quotes by Margaret Mead

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American society is very like a fish society. . . . Among certain species of fish, the only thing which determines order of dominance is length of time in the fishbowl. The oldest resident picks on the newest resident, and if the newest resident is removed to a new bowl, he, as oldest resident, will pick on the newcomers.
Margaret Mead
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Living in the modern world, clothed and muffled, forced to convey our sense of our bodies in terms of remote symbols like walking sticks and umbrellas and handbags, it is easy to lose sight of the immediacy of the human body plan.
Margaret Mead
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The important thing about women today is, as they get older, they still keep house. It's one reason why they don't die, but men die when they retire. Women just polish the teacups.
Margaret Mead
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The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as - carried too far - one of its weaknesses.
Margaret Mead
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Women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
Margaret Mead
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there are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing.
Margaret Mead
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In each age there is a series of pressing questions which must be asked and answered. On the correctness of the questions depends the survival of those who ask on the quality of the answers depends the quality of the life those survivors will lead.
Margaret Mead
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The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society.
Margaret Mead
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In this country, some people start being miserable about growing old while they are still young.
Margaret Mead
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Human beings do not carry civilization in their genes. All that we do carry in our genes are certain capacities- the capacity to learn to walk upright, to use our brains, to speak, to relate to our fellow men, to construct and use tools, to explore the universe, and to express that exploration in religion, in art, in science, in philosophy.
Margaret Mead
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The liberals have not softened their view of actuality to make themselves live closer to the dream, but instead sharpen their perceptions and fight to make the dream actuality.
Margaret Mead
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The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown... The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers.
Margaret Mead
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No matter how free divorce, how frequently marriages break up, in most societies there is the assumption of permanent mating, of the idea that the marriage should last as long as both live. . . . No known society has ever invented a form of marriage strong enough to stick that did not contain the 'till death us do part' assumption.
Margaret Mead
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In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world
Margaret Mead
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EARTH DAY reminds the people of the world of the need for continuing care which is vital to Earth's safety.
Margaret Mead
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Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.
Margaret Mead
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What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love.
Margaret Mead
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The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.
Margaret Mead
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And as I had my father's kind of mind-which was also his mother's-I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.
Margaret Mead
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And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.
Margaret Mead