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I learned to observe the world around me, and to note what I saw

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
Saws
Learned
Around
World
Observe
Note
Notes

More quotes by Margaret Mead

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In contrast to our own social environment which brings out different aspects of human nature and often demonstrated that behavior which occurs almost invariably in individuals within our society is nevertheless due not to original nature but to social environment and a homogeneous and simple development of the individual may be studied.
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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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.
Margaret Mead
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to the extent that either sex is disadvantaged, the whole culture is poorer, and the sex that, superficially, inherits the earth, inherits only a very partial legacy. The more whole the culture, the more whole each member, each man, each woman, each child will be.
Margaret Mead
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The atmosphere is the key symbol of global interdependence.
Margaret Mead
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Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
Margaret Mead
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Home, I learned, can be anywhere you make it. Home is also the place to which you come back again and again.
Margaret Mead
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If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.
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 our contemporary world, no one can think or work with a single picture of what a family is. No one can fit all human behavior, all thought and feeling, into a single pattern.
Margaret Mead
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Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.
Margaret Mead
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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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Blackberry winter, the time when the hoarforst lies on the blackberry blossoms without this frost the berries will not set. It is the forerunner of a rich harvest.
Margaret Mead
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Everybody's suffering is mine but not everybody's murdering ... I do not distinguish for one moment whether my child is in danger or a child in central Asia. But I will not accept responsibility for what other people do because I happen to belong to that nation or that race or that religion. I do not believe in guilt by association.
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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We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.
Margaret Mead
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If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter.
Margaret Mead
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It was not until we saw the picture of the earth, from the moon, that we realized how small and how helpless this planet is - something that we must hold in our arms and care for.
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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Cynicism is the other thing that goes with sentimentality.
Margaret Mead