Margaret Meade Quotes

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

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

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

Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression.

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.

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

Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.

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

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.

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.

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

Sisters is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship. ~Margaret Mead

If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.

It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.

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

I'm just saying we can all work on our manners. We can say please and thank you. We can be punctual. We can just be nicer to one another. It's something we have in our power to do. It reminds me of that Margaret Mead quote: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

I measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her fellow human beings.

My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.

Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.

An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift

Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.

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 it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?

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

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

It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.

I learned to observe the world around me, and to note what I saw

A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon. Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.” A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend. Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.

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 will find a fitting place.

as the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep,so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily , to appreciate more lovingly , our own.

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.

The notion that we are products of our environment is our greatest sin; we are products of our choices." Margaret Mead (this may not be her exact wording, but it's close enough).

Margaret Mead once said, 'Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.' He paused. 'Indeed, they are the only ones who ever have.

Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.

Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.

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

Women have an important contribution to make.

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded in 1948, after observing seven different ethnic groups in the Pacific Islands, that different cultures made different forms of female sexual experience seem normal and desirable. The capacity for orgasm in women, she found, is a learned response, which a given culture can help or can fail to help its women to develop. Mead believed that a woman's sexual fulfillment, and the positive meaning of her sexuality in her own mind, depend upon three factors: 1: She must live in a culture that recognizes female desire as being of value; 2: Her culture must allow her to understand her sexual anatomy; 3: And her culture must teach the various sexual skills that give women orgasms.

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.

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

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.

No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation. We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have. We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.

What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal an get away with it.

Of all the forms in which ideas are disseminated, the college professor lecturing his class is the slowest and the most expensive. You don't have to go to college to learn about the great ideas of Western man. If you want to learn about Milton, or Camus, or even Margaret Mead, you can find them. In paperback. In the library.

The astounding energy of post-menopausal women (promised by Margaret Mead) is here, but the optimism to fuel it is not. The world seems ever more surely in the grip of materialism and surfaces. Image, image, image is all it sees. As an image, I'm definitely getting blurry.

Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants.

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.

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.

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

Up to a few years ago nearly all the literature about Oceania was written by papalagi and other outsiders. Our islands were and still are a goldmine for romantic novelists and filmmakers, bar-room journalists and semi-literate tourists, sociologists and Ph.D. students, remittance men and sailing evangelists, UNO experts, and colonial administrators and their well-groomed spouses. Much of this literature ranges from the hilariously romantic through the pseudo-scholarly to the infuriatingly racist; from the noble savage literary school through Margaret Mead and all her comings of age, Somerset Maugham's puritan missionaries/drunks/and saintly whores and James Michener's rascals and golden people, to the stereotyped childlike pagan who needs to be steered to the Light.

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.

for All Ages Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. —HENRY FORD 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. —MARGARET MEAD

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance

Long ago, Margaret Mead, the world-famous anthropologist, noted that we should "never underestimate the power of a small group with dedication to change the world; it is, in fact, the only thing that does.

Anthropologist and teacher Margaret Mead said in Redbook magazine in 1963, “If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the University and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.

Sir" said Mrs. Meade indignantly. "There are NO deserters in the Confederate army." "I beg your pardon," said Rhett with mock humility. "I meant those thousands on furlough who FORGOT to rejoin their regiments and those who have been over their wounds for six months but who remain at home, going about their usual business or doing the spring plowing.

I'm unique just like everyone else

John—my brother—was a homosexual,” Elizabeth said. “Oh,” he said, as if now he understood. “I’m sorry.” She propped herself up on one elbow and peered at him in the darkness. “What is that supposed to mean?” she shot back. “Well, but—how did you know? Surely he didn’t tell you he was.” “I’m a scientist, Calvin, remember? I knew. Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality; it’s completely normal—a basic fact of human biology. I have no idea why people don’t know this. Does no one read Margaret Mead anymore? The point is, I knew John was a homosexual, and he knew I knew. We talked about it. He didn’t choose it; it was simply part of who he was. The best part was,” she said wistfully, “he knew about me, too.” “Knew you were—” “A scientist!” Elizabeth snapped.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and not be held responsible. [Cultural Factors in the Cause of Pathological Homicide. Bulletin of Menninger Clinic]

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.

You idolize peasants. You look up to island savages living “at one with Nature,” I ask you to see what happened to Margaret Mead, and how the Polynesians punked her—most of the things she wrote about their views on life, about their sexual freedom, was nonsense they made up to make her look foolish. In same way the fools like Gimbutas and others who believe that mankind at some remote point lived under a benevolent matriarchy, again, “at one with Nature,” in balance with the needs of the soil and such: sheer nonsense. Everywhere historians, archaeologists find what we thought was matriarchy was really no such thing.

CHILDREN MUST BE TAUGHT HOW TO THINK, NOT WHAT TO THINK

We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other's only hope.

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

gullible but immensely influential American anthropologist Margaret Mead,* and

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night. —MARGARET MEAD

A antropóloga norte-americana Margaret Mead escreveu: “A virtude é quando se tem a dor seguida do prazer, o vício é quando se tem o prazer seguido da dor”.

Margaret Mead wrote that “growing up means getting outside oneself and cherishing the life of the world.

There’s nothing naive about believing that concerted democratic campaigning can change the world. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “It’s the only thing that ever has.

[M]aleness in America," as Margaret Mead wrote, "is not absolutely defined; it has to be kept and reearned every day, and one essential element in the definition is beating women in every game that both sexes play." Nothing seems to crush the masculine petals more than a bit of feminist rain - a few drops are perceived as a downpour. "Men view even small losses of deference, advantages or opportunities as large threats, " wrote William Goode, one of many sociologists to puzzle over the peculiarly hyperbolic male reaction to minuscule improvements to women's rights.

After all, we are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native in that land. Margaret Mead famously wrote about the profound changes wrought by the Second World War, “All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before.” Today we are again in the early stages of defining a new age. The very underpinnings of our society and institutions--from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate--are being profoundly reshaped by amplified individuals. We are indeed all migrating to a new land and should be looking at the new landscape emerging before us like immigrants: ready to learn a new language, a new way of doing things, anticipating new beginnings with a sense of excitement, if also with a bit of understandable trepidation.

A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.' - James Baldwin

Never underestimate the power of a small, dedicated group of people to change the world; indeed, that is the only thing that ever has.

When I kiss her I am kissing 1903.

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

Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

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

You are totally unique. Just like everyone else.

Education for All Ages Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. —HENRY FORD 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. —MARGARET MEAD

What is wrong with women?” Elizabeth demanded. “Why do they buy into these cultural stereotypes? Worse, why do they perpetuate them? Are they not aware of the dominant female role in the hidden tribes of the Amazon? Is Margaret Mead out of print?” She only stopped when Harriet stood up, indicating she did not wish to be subjected to another unabridged word. — “Harriet. Harriet,” Madeline repeated. “Are you listening? Harriet, what happened to her? Did she die, too?” “Did who die?” Harriet asked distractedly, thinking about how she’d never read Margaret Mead. Was she the one who wrote Gone with the Wind? “The godmother.” “Oh, her,” she said. “I have no idea. And anyway, she—or he—wasn’t technically a godmother.” “But you said—” “It was a fairy

Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher. Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalists gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why. As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.” The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento. . .blah, blah, blah.” The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment. Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’” “It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls. “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.” For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret—a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.

the National Research Council (NRC) hired a team of anthropologists, led by the venerable Margaret Mead, to study American food habits. How do people decide what’s good to eat, and how do you go about changing their minds? Studies were undertaken, recommendations drafted, reports published—including Mead’s 1943 opus “The Problem of Changing Food Habits: Report of the Committee on Food Habits,” and if ever a case were to be made for word-rationing, there it was. The

Home was five blocks away. She would not wait for the sobbing Peter to harness the buggy, would not wait for Dr. Meade to drive her home. She could not endure the tears of the one, the silent condemnation of the other. She went swiftly down the dark front steps without her coat or bonnet and into the misty night. She rounded the corner and started up the long hill toward Peachtree Street, walking in a still wet world, and even her footsteps were as noiseless as a dream.

If you wish to know who is really the lover, look then not at the boy who sits by her side, looks boldly into her eyes and twists the flowers in her necklace around his fingers and steals the hibiscus flower from her hair that he may wear it behind his ear. Do not think it is he who whispers softly in her ear, or says to her 'Sweetheart, wait for me to-night. After the moon has set, I will come to you,' or who teases her by saying she has many lovers. Look instead at the boy who sits far-off, who sits with bent head and takes no part in the joking. And you will see that in his eyes are always turned softly on the girl. Always he watches her and never does he miss a movement of her lips. Perhaps she will wink at him, perhaps she will raise her eyebrows, perhaps she will make a sign with her hand, he must always be wakeful and watchful or else he will miss it.

Common sense was exactly what kingship, almost by definition, lacked: when the king's orders were executed no one dared to tell him honestly how they had turned out. With the absolute powers bestowed by kingship came an arrogance, a ruthlessness, an inflexibility, a habit of compulsion, an unwillingness to listen to reason, that no small community would have endured from any of its members-though the aggressive and humanly disagreeable qualities that make for such ambitious leadership might be found anywhere-as Margaret Mead discovered among the Mundugumor, whose leaders were known to the community as "really bad men," aggressive, gluttonous for power and prestige.

Primer of Love [Lesson 40] Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else. ~ Margaret Mead Lesson 40) Lovingly celebrate your partner's peculiarities. You were brought up by two totally different dysfunctional families. No two sets of alcoholic parents are alike. You each come with your own tics, tacs and oddities. Lovingly accept these differences as aspects of your lover's uniqueness. An aspect is just the other side of the coin of some quality you already love about them. For instance is he barks whenever he urinates, this is simply an aspect of his need to guard over you and protect you from own worst enemy * yourself. If she yells out the name of a previous lover during an orgasm, this is just another aspect ofah, fuck it! * put the down pillow on her sorry face and suffocate the bitch.

In the classic case of the Mountain Arapesh, Margaret Mead maintained they were and had been peaceful, yet there is solid evidence that no more than a generation earlier they had engaged in substantial warfare, thus demonstrating the problem that arises involving warfare with all such studies.25 Thus research by university-trained anthropologists of the twentieth century is much less useful for understanding forager warfare than the early accounts of explorers, missionaries and patrol officers. Such early historic and ethnographic data on the Alaskan Iñupiaq and Aboriginal Australians can be extremely enlightening.26 These early accounts have the potential for bias and lack of completeness and must be used with caution, but such is the case with all data. It appears that the failure to comprehend the problems with recent, twentieth-century ethnographic studies renders the opinions of people like Douglas Fry and Brian Ferguson about peaceful societies virtually worthless.” (Steven Leblanc)

You and I are learning to see our trait as a neutral thing—useful in some situations, not in others—but our culture definitely does not see it, or any trait as neutral. The anthropologist Margaret Mead explained it well. Although a culture’s newborns will show a broad range of inherited temperaments, only a narrow band of these, a certain type, will be the ideal. The ideal personality is embodied, in Mead's words, in 'every thread of the social fabric—in the care of the young child, the games the children play, the songs the people sing, the political organization, the religious observance, the art and the philosophy.' Other traits are ignored, discouraged, or if all else fails, ridiculed. What is the ideal in our culture? Movies, advertisements, the design of public spaces, all tell us we should be as tough as the Terminator, as stoic as Clint Eastwood, as outgoing as Goldie Hawn. We should be pleasantly stimulated by bright lights, noise, a gang of cheerful fellows hanging out in a bar. If we are feeling overwhelmed and sensitive, we can always take a painkiller.

It is an attention rebellion,' [Ben Stewart] said. I realised this requires a shift in how we think about ourselves. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for crumbs of attention. We are free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds and our own society, and together, we are going to take them back. At times it seemed to me that this would be a hard movement to get off the ground - but then I remembered that all the movements that have changed your life and my life were hard to get off the ground. ...What we face is, in many ways, vastly less challenging than the cliff they had to scale. They didn't give up. Often, when a person argues for social change, they are called 'naive.' The exact opposite is the truth. It's naive to think we as citizens can do nothing, and leave the powerful to do whatever they want, and somehow our attention will survive. There's nothing naive about believing that concerted democratic campaigning can change the world. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said, it's the only thing that ever has. I realised that we have to decide now: do we value attention and focus? Does being able to think deeply matter to us? Do we want it for our children? If we do, then we have to fight for it. As one politician said - you don't get what you don't fight for.

Obviously the most enduring way to make this commitment is through marriage. Yet because sexual liberals deny the differences between the sexes, their explanations of why there are marriages and why marriage is needed and desired ignore the central truth of marriage: that it is built on sex roles. Pressed to explain the institution, they respond vaguely that human beings want "structure" or desire "intimacy." But however desirable in marriage, these values are not essential causes or explanations of it. In many cultures, the wife and husband share very few one-to-one intimacies. Ties with others of the same sex--or even the opposite sex--often offer deeper companionship. The most intimate connections are between mothers and their children. In all societies, male groups provide men with some of their most emotionally gratifying associations. Indeed, intimacy can deter or undermine wedlock. In the kibbutz, for example, where unrelated boys and girls are brought up together and achieve a profound degree of companionate feeling, they never marry members of the same child-rearing group. In the many cultures where marriages are arranged, the desire for intimacy is subversive of marriage. Similarly, man's "innate need for structure" can be satisfied in hundreds of forms of organization. The need for structure may explain all of them or none of them, but it does not tell us why, of all possible arrangements, marriage is the one most prevalent. It does not tell us why, in most societies, marriage alone is consecrated in a religious ceremony and entails a permanent commitment. As most anthropologists see it, however, the reason is simple. The very essence of marriage, Bronislaw Malinowski wrote, is not structure and intimacy; it is "parenthood and above all maternity." The male role in marriage, as Margaret Mead maintained, "in every known human society, is to provide for women and children." In order to marry, in fact, Malinowski says that almost every human society first requires the man "to prove his capacity to maintain the woman." Marriage is not simply a ratification of an existing love. It is the conversion of that love into a biological and social continuity. . . . Regardless of what reasons particular couples may give for getting married, the deeper evolutionary and sexual propensities explain the persistence of the institution. All sorts of superficial variations--from homosexual marriage to companionate partnership--may be played on the primal themes of human life. But the themes remain. The natural fulfillment of love is a child; the fantasies and projects of the childless couple may well be considered as surrogate children.

We are past our reproductive years. Men don’t want us; they prefer younger women. It makes good biological sense for males to be attracted to females who are at an earlier point in their breeding years and who still want to build nests, and if that leaves us no longer able to lose ourselves in the pleasures and closeness of pairing, well, we have gained our Selves. We have another valuable thing, too. We have Time, or at least the awareness of it. We have lived long enough and seen enough to understand in a more than intellectual way that we will die, and so we have learned to live as though we are mortal, making our decisions with care and thought because we will not be able to make them again. Time for us will have an end; it is precious, and we have learned its value. Yes, there are many of us, but we are all so different that I am uncomfortable with a sociobiological analysis, and I suspect that, as with Margaret Mead, the solution is a personal and individual one. Because our culture has assigned us no real role, we can make up our own. It is a good time to be a grown-up woman with individuality, strength and crotchets. We are wonderfully free. We live long. Our children are the independent adults we helped them to become, and though they may still want our love they do not need our care. Social rules are so flexible today that nothing we do is shocking. There are no political barriers to us anymore. Provided we stay healthy and can support ourselves, we can do anything, have anything and spend our talents any way that we please.

No? And yet you are a part of it, like I was, and I’ll wager you don’t like it any more than I did. Well, why am I the black sheep of the Butler family? For this reason and no other—I didn’t conform to Charleston and I couldn’t. And Charleston is the South, only intensified. I wonder if you realize yet what a bore it is? So many things that one must do because they’ve always been done. So many things, quite harmless, that one must not do for the same reason. So many things that annoyed me by their senselessness. Not marrying the young lady, of whom you have probably heard, was merely the last straw. Why should I marry a boring fool, simply because an accident prevented me from getting her home before dark? And why permit her wild-eyed brother to shoot and kill me, when I could shoot straighter? If I had been a gentleman, of course, I would have let him kill me and that would have wiped the blot from the Butler escutcheon. But—I like to live. And so I’ve lived and I’ve had a good time…. When I think of my brother, living among the sacred cows of Charleston, and most reverent toward them, and remember his stodgy wife and his Saint Cecilia Balls and his everlasting rice fields—then I know the compensation for breaking with the system. Scarlett, our Southern way of living is as antiquated as the feudal system of the Middle Ages. The wonder is that it’s lasted as long as it has. It had to go and it’s going now. And yet you expect me to listen to orators like Dr. Meade who tell me our Cause is just and holy? And get so excited by the roll of drums that I’ll grab a musket and rush off to Virginia to shed my blood for Marse Robert? What kind of a fool do you think I am? Kissing the rod that chastised me is not in my line. The South and I are even now. The South threw me out to starve once. I haven’t starved, and I am making enough money out of the South’s death throes to compensate me for my lost birthright.

Why should I fight to uphold the system that cast me out? I shall take pleasure in seeing it smashed.' 'I never heard of any system,' she said crossly. 'No? And yet you are a part of it, like I was, and I'll wager you don't like it any more than I did. Well, why am I the black sheep of the butler family? For this reason and no other-I didn't conform to Charleston and I couldn't. And Charleston is the South, only intensified. I wonder if you realize yet what a bore it is? So many things that one must do because they've always been done. So many things, quite harmless, that one must not do for the same reason. So many things that annoyed me by their senselessness. not marrying the young lady, of whom you have probably heard, was merely the last straw. Why should I marry a boring fool, simply because an accident prevented me from getting her home before dark? And why permit her wild-eyed brother to shoot and kill me, when I could shoot straighter? If I had been a gentleman, of course, I would have let him kill me and that would have wiped the blot from the Butler escutcheon. But-I like to live. And so I've lived and I've had a good time. . . . When I think of my brother, living among t he sacred cows of Charleston, and most reverent toward them, and remember his stodgy wife and his Saint Cecilia Balls and his everlasting rice fields-then I know the compensation for breaking with the system. Scarlett, our Southern way of living is as antiquated as the feudal system of the Middle Ages. The wonder is that it's lasted as long as it has. It had to go and it's going now. And yet you expect me to listen to orators like Dr. Meade who tell me our Cause is just and holy? And get so excited by the roll of drums that I'll grab a musket and rush off to Virginia to shed my blood for Marse Robert? What kind of a fool do you think I am? Kissing the rod that chastised me is not in my line. The South and I are even now. The South threw me out to starve once. I haven't starved, and I am making enough money out of the South's death throes to compensate me for my lost birthright.

Hi, Emily. You don’t know me. My name’s Liam and I’m Ali’s boyfriend. If you’ve been watching us from wherever, you know that already, though.” I swallow. “I’m sorry about what happened. Ali really loved you. I have no doubt about that. But...” I read through the hymns and the music, including Satie’s Gnossienne. At the funeral, Ali read a poem called ‘Remember Me’ by Margaret Mead. To the living, I am gone. To the sorrowful, I will never return. To the angry, I was cheated. But to the happy, I am at peace. And to the faithful, I have never left. It’s as though Emily is speaking to me, telling me that she can be happy for us. Her sister’s anger is not going to bring her back. I hope it’s true. I find myself tearing up, even though I didn’t know her. I can imagine how moving Ali’s recitation was. “Ali and I are happy and I think you would be supportive of him. Your sister’s angry because she’s hurt but Ali has no intention of causing her pain. Or your parents. Please, wish me luck

I have always tended to look to the special circumstances of my childhood whenever I felt unhappy or lacking in confidence, and yet it is not reasonable to attribute a degree of estrangement that is part of the general human condition to a particular idiosyncratic experience.

Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until noveltyt and entertainmet are built up as positive experiences.

We talk in this country often about property rights, but we talk more rarely about the shares people have in each other's lives, and about people's rights to participation and pleasure, especially at the moments of passage: the right to throw a handful of earth on a coffin, the right to stand up to catch a tossed bouquet and dream of one's own future wedding, to kiss a bride or groom and to hold a newborn. Couple's today devise new rituals or set up housekeeping together in ways most meaningful to themselves without wondering whether meaning is something they owe to a larger community.