A Quote by Margaret Mead

Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention

Margaret Mead

Quote Topics

Biological Fathers Invention Mothers Necessity Social

Quote Author

Margaret Mead
American - Scientist
December 16, 1901 - November 15, 1978

It's true that necessity is the mother of invention. But for those of us without fathers, there is a deeper truth - necessity is the mother of self-invention.

Michael Hainey

War is only an invention, not a biological necessity.

Margaret Mead

Mothers are the necessity of invention.

Bill Watterson

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

Margaret Mead

Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention.

Margaret Mead

I want to congratulate all the men out there who are working diligently to be good fathers whether they are stepfathers, or biological fathers or just spiritual fathers.

T. D. Jakes

All fathers are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers and fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to fathers than meets the eye.

Margaret Atwood

Mothers and fathers act in mostly similar ways toward their young children. Psychologists are still highlighting small differencesrather than the overwhelming similarities in parents' behaviors. I think this is a hangover from the 1950s re-emergence of father as a parent. He has to be special. The best summary of the evidence on mothers and fathers with their babies is that young children of both sexes, in most circumstances, like both parents equally well. Fathers, like mothers, are good parents first and gender representatives second.

Sandra Scarr

As important as the father is in the life of a child, even he must take second place to mother during the first three years of life.... Consequently, mothers actually have more to do with producing a predisposition toward homosexuality than fathers. Two kinds of mothers are particularly harmful - smother mothers and dominating mothers.

Tim LaHaye

We perversely see mother love as the problem--when it is all we have to sustain us--rather than blaming the fathers who have run out on our mothers and on us. We seem willing to forgive fathers for loving too little even as we still shrink in terror from mothers who love too much.

Frank Pittman

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

Alison Gopnik

I'm not saying that all women are blameless - all women are not. There are women with despicable characters who are cruel and terrible and some of them are mothers. But why do we blame our mothers more than our fathers? We let our fathers get away scot-free. We hardly even knew who they were in many cases, given the way this culture raises kids, and they may have been quite cruel. They may even have raped us as children, but even if they raped us, we will blame our mothers for not protecting us instead of blaming our fathers who actually did it.

Gloria Steinem

Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.

William Shenstone

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.

Alfred North Whitehead

Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it.