Margaret Mead

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.

Always tell the truth. That way, you don't have to remember what you said.

The defense of the West must be a defense of the individual.

In my own family, the biggest lesson I learned was that happiness is always under our nose.

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the world over except as the forces of culture and environment have made them different.

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.

The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

Culture is the learned part of human behavior.

To cherish what remains of the Earth you must first reject the homogenizing hush of total isolation.

The American way of life, which presupposes a certain amount of leisure, is not something that can be maintained by everyone.

I've always been impressed by the fact that there are a lot of people who are not interested in the world around them.

Sex education, including its physical, social, moral and religious aspects, is necessary if we are to meet the problems of life today.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the average man will strive to protect and defend.

On her deathbed: I have been the luckiest person in the world.

We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac and reading our horoscopes.

Human evolution has always involved a balance between the emphasis on individual and on collective survival.

We are living in a world that no one has ever lived in before.

The most powerful way to change a culture is to change the story.

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to draw a line at one year, two years, four years, or six years, and say that at this point the human being has not yet begun to be a human being.