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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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Margaret Mead
Age: 76 †
Born: 1901
Born: December 16
Died: 1978
Died: November 15
Anthropologist
Cultural Anthropologist
Curator
Film Director
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Life
Peoples
Spent
Americans
Study
Understand
Lives
Better
Faraway
Might
Studying

More quotes by 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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If sports are the toy department of life, then the NFL is the FAO Schwartz of sports.
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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The first step in the direction of a world rule of law is the recognition that peace no longer is an unobtainable ideal but a necessary condition of continued human existence. But to take even this step we must return to a calm and responsible frame of mind in which we can face the long patient tasks ahead.
Margaret Mead
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A small group of thoughtful people could change the world.
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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What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love.
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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[Among the Arapeh... both father and mother are held responsible for child care by the entire community...] If one comments upon a middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer: 'Good-looking? Ye-e-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all those children'.
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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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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Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.
Margaret Mead
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there are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing.
Margaret Mead
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War is only an invention, not a biological necessity.
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.
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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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.
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.
Margaret Mead
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the people of one nation alone cannot save their own children each holds the responsibility for the others' children.
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