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Our human situation no longer permits us to make armed dichotomies between those who are good and those who are evil, those who are right and those who are wrong. The first blow dealt to the enemy's children will sign the death warrant of our own.

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
Make
Evil
Armed
Good
Death
Permit
Firsts
Sign
Dichotomies
Human
Blow
Warrant
Humans
Longer
Dichotomy
First
Enemy
Warrants
Right
Situation
Permits
Children
Wrong
Dealt

More quotes by Margaret Mead

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A society which is clamouring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice.
Margaret Mead
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It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.
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
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War is only an invention, not a biological necessity.
Margaret Mead
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today's children are the first generation to grow up in a world that has the power to destroy itself.
Margaret Mead
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I learned the value of hard work by working hard.
Margaret Mead
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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.
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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Cynicism is the other thing that goes with sentimentality.
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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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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Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.
Margaret Mead
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I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman.
Margaret Mead
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I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples - faraway peoples - so that Americans might better understand themselves.
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.
Margaret Mead
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The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it alone
Margaret Mead
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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.
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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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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Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead