And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.

- Margaret Mead

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

- Margaret Mead

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.

- Margaret Mead

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

- Margaret Mead

Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.

- Margaret Mead

Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.

- Margaret Mead

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

- Margaret Mead

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

- Margaret Mead

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.

- Margaret Mead

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

- Margaret Mead

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

- Margaret Mead

The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one's mind.

- Margaret Mead

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.

- Margaret Mead

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.

- Margaret Mead

We have nowhere else to go... this is all we have.

- Margaret Mead

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

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

Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.

- Margaret Mead

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

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

- Margaret Mead