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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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Margaret Mead
Age: 76 †
Born: 1901
Born: December 16
Died: 1978
Died: November 15
Anthropologist
Cultural Anthropologist
Curator
Film Director
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Thinking
Feeling
World
Family
Pattern
Feelings
Contemporary
Thought
Patterns
Human
Fit
Humans
Picture
Work
Behavior
Think
Single

More quotes by Margaret Mead

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We end up with the contradictory picture of a society that appears to throw its doors wide open to women, but translates her every step towards success as having been damaging.
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Because of their age long training in human relations for that is what feminine intuition really is women have a special contribution to make any group enterprise.
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Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.
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Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform.
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My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.
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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.
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Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.
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Interest and proficiency in almost any one activity-swimming, boating, fishing, skiing, skating-breed interest in many more. Once someone discovers the delight of mastering one skill, however slightly, he is likely to try out not just one more, but a whole ensemble.
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I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.
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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.
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Maleness in America is not absolutely defined it has to be kept and re-earned every day, and one essential element in the definition is beating women in every game that both sexes play.
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Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.
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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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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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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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Man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.
Margaret Mead
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This is a precious possession which we cannot afford to tarnish, but society always is attempting to make the physician into a killer to kill the defective child at birth, to leave the sleeping pills beside the bed of the cancer patient ... It is the duty of society to protect the physicians from such requests.
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If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.
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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.
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there are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing.
Margaret Mead