Margaret Mead Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• 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.

  Margaret Mead

  Women, History, Diversity

  Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies conclusion (1935)

• A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.

  Margaret Mead

  Order, Two, Promise

• 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

  Thinking, People, Political

  Margaret Mead, Rhoda Bubendey Métraux (1980). “Aspects of the Present”, William Morrow

• There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

  Margaret Mead

  Arrogance, Self Control, Culture

  Margaret Mead (2000). “And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America”, p.152, Berghahn Books

• An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift

  Margaret Mead

  Culture, Humans, Ideals

• 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

  Sex, Children, Equality

  Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

• 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

  Children, Science, Oedipus

  Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

• From a hundred cultures, [there is] one culture which does what no culture has ever done before-gives a place to every human gift.

  Margaret Mead

  Giving, Doe, Culture

  Margaret Mead (2000). “And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America”, p.162, Berghahn Books

• If they learn easily, they are penalized for being bored when they have nothing to do; if they excel in some outstanding way, they are penalized as being conspicuously better than the peer group. The culture tries to make the child with a gift into a one-sided person, to penalize him at every turn, to cause him trouble in making friends and to create conditions conducive to the development of a neurosis. Neither teachers, the parents of other children, nor the child peers will tolerate a Wunderkind.

  Margaret Mead

  Motivational, Teacher, Children

• As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

  Margaret Mead

  Travel, Home, Memorable

  "Coming of Age in Samoa". Book by Margaret Mead, 1928.

• What are the determinative factors in the early training of the child which assures that it will be placid and contented, unaggressive and non-initiatory, non-competitive and responsive, warm, docile, and trusting?

  Margaret Mead

  Sex, Culture, Docile

  "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies". Book by Margaret Mead, 1935.

• 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

  Sex, Differences, Two

  Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

• In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.

  Margaret Mead

  Teacher, Teaching, Adults

  "An Anthropologist Looks at the Teacher's Role". Educational Method, Vol 21, p. 219-223, 1942.

• Photographs [are] of course heavily dependent upon the culture, the disciplinary point of view and the idiosyncratic vision of the particular photographer-analyst.

  Margaret Mead

  Views, Vision, Culture

  Margaret Mead, Paul Byers (1968). “The small conference: An innovation in communication”, p.6, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

• in all cultures, human beings - in order to be human - must understand the nonhuman.

  Margaret Mead

  Order, Culture, Humans

  Margaret Mead (1972). “Twentieth century faith: hope and survival”, Harper & Row Barnes & Noble Import Division

• The capacity for friendship usually goes with highly developed civilizations. The ability to cultivate people differs by culture and class; but on the whole, educated people have more ways to make friends... . In England, for instance, you find everyone in your class has read the same books. Here, people grope for something in common-like a newly engaged girl who came to me and said, "It's absolutely wonderful! His uncle and my cousin were on the same football team.

  Margaret Mead

  Friendship, Girl, Football

• human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.

  Margaret Mead

  Suffering, Identity, Culture

  Margaret Mead (1970). “Culture and Commitment”

• Love is the invention of a few high cultures ... it is cultural artifact. To make love the requirement of a lifelong marriage is exceedingly difficult, and only a few people can achieve it. I don't believe in setting universal standards that a large proportion of people can't reach.

  Margaret Mead

  Love, Believe, People

• We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.

  Margaret Mead

  Men, Differences, Generations

  Male and Female ch. 1 (1949)

• Mead's anthropology had many other red, white and blue- blooded virtues. One was the common anthropological conceit, out of which she made a career, to the effect that the ultimate value of studying other cultures was the use we could make of them to reconstruct our own - a heady kind of intellectual imperialism, as if the final meaning of others' lives was their significance for us.

  Margaret Mead

  Blue, Other Cultures, Careers

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