I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples – faraway peoples – so that Americans might better understand themselves.
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.
Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression.
We must turn all of our educational efforts to training our children for the choices which will confront them... The child who is to choose wisely must be healthy in mind and body. The children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
If we make one criterion for defining the artist the impulse to make something new, or to do something in a new way – a kind of divine discontent with all that has gone before, however good – then we can find such artists at every level of human culture, even when performing acts of great simplicity.
I’m unique just like everyone else.
Too many people, when they reject God, go on believing in the devil. Many intellectuals have a sense of evil without a confidence in good.
Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
You are totally unique. Just like everyone else.