Margaret Mead Quotes
For the first time in human history, there are no elders anymore who know what young people know.
Margaret Mead, 1901-1978, Anthropologist, Quoted in Life, Fall 1990
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Russia was very backward scientifically at the Russian Revolution. Stalin and other of the new Communist leaders realzied that they had to have Russians emprace and gain competence in science but at the same time they were worried that scientists examining Marxist so called "Scientific" analysis of economics and history might reach different conclusions and undermine the party line.
In the political norms of the 21st century this is a remarkable statement. Here we have the President’s wife, at the end of his first term, stating that her generation has failed. If anyone close to the Obama administration in 2012, after his first 4 years, had stated that we had failed, the press would have had a field day and the minority party would be running the statement day and night as attack ads. “He’s been in control for 4 years and we are still a failure. He is incompetent.” The reality is that political honesty was not punished in the 1940’s as it was in the early 21st century. In 1936 most Americans were not sure we would ever have an economic recovery even though things were getting a little better. It would certainly take over a decade. In reality it took 20 years and a major war. In 2012 many thought that it would be more than a decade to make up for all the lost jobs and standard of living for the average person. But no politician, much less anyone in the administration would ever admit that or even say we had “failed” when that generation of politicians, business and labor leaders surely did.
This has almost come to pass. The public pays for most of the arts today via the publishing and entertainment industries, and while there are still private patrons of the arts who contribute much, the government, acting in the name of the people are beginning to act as artistic patrons. At the time she and her husband, through the WPA actually used government money to support theater companies, painters, writers, photographers, dancers and other artists and art projects.
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College in New York City and her MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University. Mead served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.
