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If we are to give our utmost effort and skill and enthusiasm, we must believe in ourselves, which means believing in our past and in our future, in our parents and in our children, in that particular blend of moral purpose and practical inventiveness which is the American character.

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
Giving
American
Believing
Children
Purpose
Enthusiasm
Mean
Future
Skills
Inventiveness
Believe
Means
Parents
Blend
Past
Particular
Utmost
Character
Parent
Practicals
Give
Effort
Skill
Must
Moral
Practical

More quotes by Margaret Mead

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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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No one will live all his life in the world into which he was born and no one will die in the world in which he worked in his maturity.
Margaret Mead
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I approached the idea of college with the expectation of taking part in an intellectual feast. ... In college, in some way that I devoutly believed in but could not explain, I expected to become a person.
Margaret Mead
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We grow up never questioning that which is unquestioned around us.
Margaret Mead
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Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.
Margaret Mead
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Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.
Margaret Mead
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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.
Margaret Mead
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As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.
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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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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we came to realize that a civilization which rode roughshod over the way of life of other peoples was incorporating evil in its own way of life.
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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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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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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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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We make our own criminals, and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.
Margaret Mead
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Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.
Margaret Mead
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The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as - carried too far - one of its weaknesses.
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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In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world
Margaret Mead