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.

Be who you really are, do what you want to do, in order to have what you really want.

There is no lonelier person than the one who lives with a spouse with whom he or she cannot communicate.

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

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.

We grow up never questioning that which is unquestioned around us.

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.

In 1976: We women are doing pretty well. We’re almost back to where we were in the twenties.

The notion that we are products of our environment is our greatest sin; we are products of our choices.

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

To demand that another love what one loves is tyranny enough, but to demand that another hate what one hates, is even worse.

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation.

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.

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.

It has been a woman’s task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope.

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

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.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and not be held responsible.

The atmosphere is the key symbol of global interdependence.

Sooner or later I’m going to die, but I’m not going to retire.

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.

Take action and believe in yourself. Dreams do come true.

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.

I have always done a woman’s job.

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

For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen.

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

Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression.

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

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 human gift will find a fitting place.

When a person is born we rejoice, and when they’re married we jubilate, but when they die we try to pretend nothing has happened.

Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.

Man’s most human characteristic is not his ability to.

A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.

Jealousy is not a barometer by which the depth of love can be read. It merely records the degree of the lover’s insecurity.

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

You can never have a relationship with someone whose smell you don’t like.

Somehow, we have to get older people back close to growing children if we are to restore a sense of community, acquire knowledge of the past, and provide a sense of the future.

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.

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

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

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.

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

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

Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.

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

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

Any woman can find a husband unless she is deaf, dumb or blind. She cannot always marry the ideal man of her choice.

There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a postmenopausal woman.

They need to find meaning…is as real as the need for trust and for love, for relations with other human beings.

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.

If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even 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.

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

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.

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

Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we’ve lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it’s the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit, we need groups, tribes.

The mind is a neural computer.

Dubai is a safe place, and I never came across anything to worry about.

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.

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.

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

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

We are living beyond our means. As a people, we have developed a lifestyle that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

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

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

Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.

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.

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

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

The ability to learn is older—as it is also more widespread—than is the ability to teach.

Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention.

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.

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

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.

In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people’s lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world.

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 life.

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

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

Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.

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.

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

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

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

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

The assumption that men were created equal, with an equal ability to make an effort and win an earthly reward, although denied every day by experience, is maintained every day by our folklore and our daydreams.

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence, in the end, is rewarded.

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?

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

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.