Margaret Mead Quotes

I think a lot of the best ideas come from the grassroots; I'm someone who does not like a bunker mentality and does not like groupthink.

I don't think in a box. I think in a sphere.

The idea is to be unrestrained by categories.

Big ideas come from forward thinking people who challenge the norm, think outside the box, and invent the world they see inside rather than submitting to the limitations of current dilemmas

I dont believe in labels. I want to do the best I can, all the time. I want to be progressive without getting both feet off the ground at the same time. I want to be prudent without having my mind closed to anything that is new or different. I have often said that I was proud that I was a free man first and an American second, and a public servant third and a Democrat fourth, in that order, and I guess as a Democrat, if I had to takeplace a label on myself, I would want to be a progressive who is prudent.

I'm not writing for fundamentalists. I'm writing for the people who have been repelled by that kind of thinking and yet who think there might be something they haven't yet discovered.

My thinking is very flexible, and I hope that it will remain flexible and creative as long as biology permits me to think and that I will remain a rebel all my life.

Our reliance in this country is on the inquiring, individual human mind. Our strength is founded there; our resilience, our ability to face an ever-changing future and to master it. We are not frozen into the backward-facing impotence of those societies, fixed in the rigidness of an official dogma, to which the future is the mirror of the past. We are free to make the future for ourselves.

The real differences around the world today are not between Jews and Arabs; Protestants and Catholics; Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. The real differences are between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it. Between those who look to the future and those who cling to the past. Between those who open their arms and those who are determined to clench their fists.

If you really want you people to innovate, buy a science fiction book, tear off the covers, and tell them it's history.

It is well for people who think, to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean.

Whenever you hear me talk about anything, you never know what I'm going to say until the words come out of my mouth. I'm not one of these Rush Limbaugh individuals, you know what he's going to say before it comes out of his mouth. Whatever the Democrats say, not 99 percent of the time, 100 percent of the time, he's on the opposite side. That's not the way I am.

I think I have terminal curiosity. So I always think that the future will be better and different than the past. As I look back and take inventory of myself, I'm very open-minded and flexible. People say the older you get, you get set in your ways. I don't think so.

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

I’d rather welcome change than cling to the past.

Let us put aside resolutely that great fright, tenderly and without malice, daring to be wrong in something important rather than right in some meticulous banality, fearing no evil while the mind is free to search, imagine, and conclude, inviting our countrymen to try other instruments than coercion and suppression in the effort to meet destiny with triumph, genially suspecting that no creed yet calendared in the annals of politics mirrors the doomful possibilities of infinity.

Children must be free to think in all directions irrespective of the peculiar ideas of parents who often seal their children's minds with preconceived prejudices and false concepts of past generations. Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are.

The most creative people have learned to tolerate the slight discomfort of indecision for much longer and so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.

Only the flexibly creative person can really manage the future, Only the one who can face novelty with confidence and without fear.

Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind.

Question authority; think for yourself. Talk to people, do things unrelated to school - to come up with your own framework for living. The world is too complex and people are too different to be overly prescriptive about the details.

There comes a time in every life when the past recedes and the future opens. It's that moment when you turn to face the unknown. Some will turn back to what they already know. Some will walk straight ahead into uncertainty. I can't tell you which one is right. But I can tell you which one is more fun.

The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.

The people who are right a lot often change their minds.

It's okay not to know everything; that would have calmed me down.