Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.
The most extraordinary thing about a really good teacher is that he or she transcends accepted educational methods. Such methods are designed to help average teachers approximate the performance of good teachers.
Blackberry winter, the time when the hoarforst lies on the blackberry blossoms; without this frost the berries will not set. It is the forerunner of a rich harvest.
For art to be reality, the whole sensuous being must be caught up in the experience.
Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention.
I learned to observe the world around me, and to note what I saw.
All social change comes from the passion of individuals.
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.
It is of very doubtful value to enlist the gifts of a woman into fields that have been defined as male; it frightens the men, unsexes the women, and muffles and distorts the contribution women could make.
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.
Man’s role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.
One characteristic of Americans is that they have no toleration at all of anybody putting up with anything. We believe that whatever is going wrong ought to be fixed.
I don’t consider my marriages as failures! It’s idiotic to assume that because a marriage ends, it’s failed.
Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.
Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.
I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
And as I had my father’s kind of mind-which was also his mother’s-I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.
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.
The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it alone.
Man’s most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.