I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over...

Each home has been reduced to the bare essentials — to barer essentials than most primitive people would consider possible. Only one woman’s hands to feed the baby, answer the telephone, turn off the gas...

I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.

“WE MUST DEVISE A SYSTEM IN WHICH PEACE IS MORE REWARDING THAN WAR.”

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.

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 gift...

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

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...

Having someone wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night is a very old human need.

Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or...

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

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

The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it alone

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

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.

We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of...

The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown… The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough...

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

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

To cherish the life of the world.

Some veil between childhood and the present is necessary. If the veil is withdrawn, the artistic imagination sickens and dies, the prophet looks in the mirror with a disillusioned and cynical sneer, the scientist goes...

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them

If I were to be taken hostage, I would not plead for release nor would I want my government to be blackmailed. I think certain government officials, industrialists and celebrated persons should make it clear...

There is no reason to think a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens cannot change the world; Indeed, that’s the only thing that ever has.

We need every human gift and cannot afford to neglect any gift because of artificial barriers of sex or race or class or national origin.

I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman. 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.

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

People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green...

Because of their age long training in human relations for that is what feminine intuition really is women have a special contribution to make any group enterprise

There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing…when we save our children, we save ourselves

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full...

Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological...

I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had.

The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for...

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.

Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.

I’ve been married three times — and each time I married the right person.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

I’ve been married three times / and each time I married the right person.

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

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.

Old age is like flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment

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

I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don’t agree with or like

L’éducation est un processus culturel (…) par lequel chaque nouvel individu est transformé en membre à part entière d’une société humaine particulière, partageant avec les autres membres une culture particulière.

As Significant as the Invention of Drama or the Novel.

The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer.