A Quote by Margaret Mead

War is only an invention, not a biological necessity.

Margaret Mead

Quote Topics

Biological Invention Necessity Only War

Quote Author

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

War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with. ... But it is not only a biological law but a moral obligation and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilization.

Friedrich von Bernhardi

Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention

Margaret Mead

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

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want.

Chuck Klosterman

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

Alison Gopnik

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.

Lionel Trilling

Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

E. B. White

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

Agatha Christie

We say that necessity is the mother of invention, and no country has more of a necessity to develop clean power than China.

Thomas Friedman

We have a duty towards music; namely to invent it. ...Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving realization of this find. What we imagine does not necessarily take on concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality; whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actually being worked out.

Igor Stravinsky

Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free.

Thomas Carlyle

Tackling climate change is not a luxury for the good times: for good and bad times it has become a necessity - but necessity is the mother of invention.