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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
Destructive
Nature
Human
Humans
Potentially
Orderly
Constructive
Aggression
Aggressive

More quotes by Margaret Mead

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The assumption that men and woman are essentially alike in all respects, or even in the most important ones, is a damaging one, as damaging as the assumption that they are different in ways in which they aren't different, perhaps more so.
Margaret Mead
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I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
Margaret Mead
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The older child who has lost or broken some valuable thing will be found when his parents return, not run away, not willing to confess, but in a deep sleep. The thief whose case is being tried falls asleep.
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I discovered when I had a child of my own that I had become a biased observer of small children. Instead of looking at them with affectionate but nonpartisan eyes, I saw each of them as older or younger, bigger or smaller, more or less graceful, intelligent, or skilled than my own child.
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.
Margaret Mead
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We — mankind — stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device — our consciousness of the crisis — as our unique contribution.
Margaret Mead
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the task of each family is also the task of all humanity. This is to cherish the living, remember those who have gone before, and prepare for those who are not yet born.
Margaret Mead
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You just have to learn not to care about the dusty mites under the beds.
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 Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.
Margaret Mead
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If sports are the toy department of life, then the NFL is the FAO Schwartz of sports.
Margaret Mead
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Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.
Margaret Mead
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Warfare ... is just an invention, older and more widespread than the jury system, but none the less an invention.
Margaret Mead
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human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.
Margaret Mead
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Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.
Margaret Mead
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It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.
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
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An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift
Margaret Mead
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Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.
Margaret Mead
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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.
Margaret Mead