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Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.

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
Humans
Potentially
Orderly
Constructive
Aggression
Aggressive
Destructive
Nature
Human

More quotes by Margaret Mead

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Earth Day is the first holy day...and is devoted to the harmony of nature... The celebration offends no historical calendar, yet it transcends them all.
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If sports are the toy department of life, then the NFL is the FAO Schwartz of sports.
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There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a postmenopausal woman.
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Children not only have to learn what their parents learned in school, but also have to learn how to learn. This has to be recognized as a new problem which is only partly solved.
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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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Samoa culture demonstrates how much the tragic or the easy solution of the Oedipus situation depends upon the inter-relationship between parents and children, and is not created out of whole cloth by the young child's biological impulses.
Margaret Mead
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In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present.
Margaret Mead
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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.
Margaret Mead
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I don't consider my marriages as failures! It's idiotic to assume that because a marriage ends, it's failed.
Margaret Mead
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An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift
Margaret Mead
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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.
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.
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When I stand on a street in a Canadian city and look across the street, it couldn't be anywhere but Canada, but how can I prove it?
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I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.
Margaret Mead
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A small group of thoughtful people could change the world.
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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Jealousy is not a barometer by which the depth of love can be read. It merely records the degree of the lover's insecurity.
Margaret Mead
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WE MUST DEVISE A SYSTEM IN WHICH PEACE IS MORE REWARDING THAN WAR.
Margaret Mead
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It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
Margaret Mead
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One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it.
Margaret Mead