Great Throughts Treasury

"The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates. Not only does he picture us caught in a tremendous man-made or God-made trap from which there is no escape, but we must also listen to him day in, day out, describe how the trap is inexorably closing. To such prophecies the human race, as presently bred and educated and situated, is incapable of listening. So some dance and some immolate themselves as human torches; some take drugs and some artists spill their creativity in sets of randomly placed dots on a white ground."

"The Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes that women need more initiating, more time for maturing of sexual feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blunderer."

"The student of culture is concerned with a characteristic which man displays more markedly than any other known creature ? the ability to transmit what he has learned. In following the procedure I suggest, the learning of Homo sapiens would be treated as a further specialization of the concept of grades, with the recognition that in some species ? possibly even in some orders ? the ability to learn may represent not only an improvement, in an evolutionary sense, but also an increase in vulnerability. Man's unique, high ability to learn, coupled as it is with a small amount of built-in behavior, represents such a vulnerability."

"The semi-metaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social."

"The study of human culture is a context within which every aspect of human life legitimately falls and necessitates no rift between work and play, professional and amateur activities."

"The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough ... so that the male may in the course of his life reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement, of which his childhood knowledge of the satisfactions of child-bearing have given him a glimpse. In the case of women, it is only necessary that they be permitted by the given social arrangements to fulfil their biological role, to attain this sense of irreversible achievement. If women are to be restless and questing, even in the face of child-bearing, they must be made so through education.... Each culture--in its own way--has developed forms that will make men satisfied in their constructive activities without distorting their sure sense of their masculinity. Fewer cultures have yet found ways in which to give women a divine discontent that will demand other satisfactions than those of child-bearing."

"The suffering of either sex / of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult / this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change."

"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 trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers."

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

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

"There has been an increased but still rather limited response to general systems theory, as variously reflected in the work of Bateson, Vayda, Rappaport, Adams, and an interest in the use of computers, programming, matrices, etc. But the interaction between general systems theory (as represented, for example, by the theoretical work of Von Bertalanffy) has been compromised, partly by the state of field data, extraordinarily incomparable as it inevitably is, as well as historical anthropological methods of dealing with wholes. General systems theory has taken its impetus from the excitement of discovering larger and larger contexts, on the one hand, and a kind of micro-probing into fine detail within a system, on the other. Both of these activities are intrinsic to anthropology to the extent that field work in living societies has been the basic disciplinary method. It is no revelation to any field-experienced anthropologist that everything is related to everything else, or that whether the entire sociocultural setting can be studied in detail or not, it has to be known in general outline."

"There is no necessary connection between warfare and human nature. Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive."

"There is no evidence that suggests women are naturally better at caring for children ... with the fact of child-bearing out of the center of attention, there is even more reason for treating girls first as human beings, then as women."

"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."

"They draw back into themselves, and are thrown back on their own bodies for gratification. The men become narcissistic and uncertain of the power of any woman, no matter how strange and beautiful, to arouse their desire, but the women remain continually receptive to male advances."

"To cherish the life of the world. [epitaph on her gravestone]"

"Throughout history, females have picked providers for mates. Males pick anything."

"Today our approaches to children are fragmented and partial. Those who care for well children know little of children who are sick. The deep knowledge that comes from the intensive attempt to cure is separated from the knowledge of those whose main task is to teach."

"Today, as we are coming to understand better the circular processes through which culture is developed and transmitted, we recognize that 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. Learning, which is based on human dependency, is relatively simple. But human capacities for creating elaborate teachable systems, for understanding and utilizing the resources of the natural world, and for governing society and creating and creating imaginary worlds all these are very complex. In the past, men relied on the least elaborate part of the circular system, the dependent learning by children, for continuity of transmission and for the embodiment of the new. Now, with our greater understanding of the process, we must cultivate the most flexible and complex part of the system; the behavior of adults. We must, in fact, teach ourselves how to alter adult behavior so that we can give up post-figurative upbringing, with its tolerated configurative components, and discover prefigurative ways of teaching and learning. We must create new models for adults who can teach their children not what to learn but how to learn and not what they should be committed to, but the value of commitment."

"We ? mankind ? stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device ? our consciousness of the crisis ? as our unique contribution."

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

"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 headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex."

"We must devise a system in which peace is more rewarding than war."

"We have got to face the fact that marriage is a terminable institution."

"We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet."

"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."

"We women are doing pretty well. We're almost back to where we were in the twenties."

"When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed. Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to be as mediocre as possible."

"What are the rewards of the tiny, ingrown, biological family opposing its closed circle of affection to a forbidding world of the strong ties between parent and children, ties which an active personal relation from birth until death?... Perhaps these are too heavy prices to pay for a specialization of emotions which might be bought about the other ways, notable through coeducation. And with such a question in our minds is interesting to note that a larger family community, in which there are several adult men and women, seems to ensure the child against the development of the crippling attitudes which have been labeled Oedipus complexes, the Electra complexes, and so on."

"We won't have a society if we destroy the environment"

"With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long as possible and then to marry in one's own village, near one's own relatives, and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions."

"Women have an important contribution to make."

"Women should be permitted to volunteer for non-combat service... We have no real way of knowing whether the kinds of training that teach men both courage and restraint would be adaptable to women or effective in a crisis. But the evidence of history and comparative studies of other species suggest that women as a fighting body might be far less amenable to the rules that prevent war from becoming a massacre and, with the use of modern weapons, that protect the survival of all humanity. That is what I meant by saying that women in combat might be too fierce."

"You just have to learn not to care about the dust mites under the beds."

"Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible."

"You know you love someone when you cannot put into words how they make you feel."

"Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are ?not? sleeping with someone."

"I asked the little white boys which they would rather be, little white girls or little Negro boys. What do you think they said? ? They said they would rather be little Negro boys."

"It always takes two generations to really lose something, but in two generations you can lose it.. The culture in this country that is ? most limited, is that of the second and third generations away from Europe. They have lost what they had and aren?t ready to take on anything else. They are scared to death and so busy being American? What we have in this country at present is a very large number of second- and third-generation Europeans who aren?t really sure they?re here? Fifteen years ago, if I gave a test to people to fill in: ?I am an American, not a _____,? most people would say ?foreigner,? and a few said ?Communist.? Now, they say ?not a Russian,? ?not an Italian,? ?not an Irishman,? ?not a Pole?: over twenty different things."

"The white world ? [has] built its dignity and built its sense of identity on the fact it wasn?t black, the way males in this country built their sense of superiority over the fact that they are not female."

"We?re sort of monglers, I was taught to say as a child. Monglers is a Pennsylvania dialect word for a dog of mixed background."

"You see, I think we have to get rid of people being proud of their ancestors, because after all they didn?t do a thing about it. What right have I to be proud of my grandfather? I can be proud of my child if I didn?t ruin her, but nobody has any right to be proud of his ancestors? The one thing you really ought to be allowed to do is to choose your ancestors... We have a term for this in anthropology: mythical ancestors? They are spiritual and mental ancestors, they?re not biological ancestors, but they are terribly important."