Ashley Montagu Quotes

The behavioral trait most frequently associated with the long-lived is placidity.

Girls marry for love. Boys marry because of a chronic irritation that causes them to gravitate in the direction of objects with certain curvilinear properties.

The way I change my life is to act as if I am the person I really want to be.

No one should be required to see America for the first time.

Love, for too many men in our time, consists of sleeping with a seductive woman, one who is properly endowed with the right distribution of curves and conveniences and one upon whom a permanent lien has been acquired through the institution of marriage.

The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness.

There have been some medical schools in which somewhere along the assembly line, a faculty member has informed the students, not so much by what he said but by what he did, that there is an intimate relation between curing and caring.

Without love, intelligence is dangerous; without intelligence, love is not enough.

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.

The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.

The loving touch, like music, often utters the things that cannot be spoken.

The measure of man's humanity is the extent and intensity of his love for mankind.

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

The Eskimos live among ice all their lives but have no single word for ice.

All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all living things whatsoever.

Human communication, 'as the saying goes, is a clash of symbols' it covers a multitude of signs. But it is more than media and messages, information and persuasion; it also meets a deeper need and serves a higher purpose. Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection.

Because women live creatively, they rarely experience the need to depict or write about that which to them is a primary experience and which men know only at a second remove. Women create naturally, men create artificially.

The family is the basis of society. As the family is, so is the society, and it is human beings who make a family-not the quantity of them, but the quality of them.

To admit ignorance is to exhibit wisdom.

Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.

The benefits to the mother of immediate breastfeeding are innumerable, not the least of which after the weariness of labor and birth is the emotional gratification, the feeling of strength, the composure, and the sense of fulfillment that comes with the handling and suckling of the baby.

Scientists do not believe in fundamental and absolute certainties. For the scientist, certainty is never an end, but a search; not the ordering of certainty, but its exploration. For the scientist, certainty represents the highest degree of probability.

One goes through school, college, medical school and one's internship learning little or nothing about goodness but a good deal about success.

Any form of corporal punishment or 'spanking' is a violent attack upon another human being's integrity. The effect remains with the victim forever and becomes an unforgiving part of his or hier personality
a massive frustration resulting in a hostility which will seek expression in later life in violent acts towards others. The sooner we understand that love and gentleness are the only kinds of called-far behavior towards children, the better. The child, especially, learns to become the kind of human being that he or she has experienced. This should be fully understood by all caregivers.

The original mixed ancestry of the Jews and their subsequent history of intermixture with every people among whom they have lived and continue to live ...

Psychosclerosis: the hardening of the attitude which causes a person to cease dreaming, seeing, thinking, and leading.

The whole of life is a journey toward youthful old age, toward self-contemplation, love, gaiety, and, in a fundamental sense, the most gratifying time of our lives ... "Old age" should be a harvest time when the riches of life are reaped and enjoyed, while it continues to be a special period for self-development and expansion.

The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.

Hatred is love frustrated.

It's by what you do that you communicate to others that you are deeply involved in their well being.

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.

The indications are that swearing preceded the development of cursing. That is, expletives, maledictions, exclamations, and imprecations of the immediately explosive or vituperative kind preceded the speechmaking and later rituals involved in the deliberate apportioning of the fate of an enemy. Swearing of the former variety is from the lips only, but the latter is from the heart. Damn it! is not that same as Damn you!

The idea of "race" represents one of the most dangerous myths of our time.

The evidence indicates that woman is, on the whole, biologically superior to man.

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

It is the mark of the cultured man that he is aware of the fact that equality is an ethical and not a biological principle

The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health

In Victorian times the purpose of life was to develop a personality once and for all and then stand on it.

For the person and for the species love is the form of behavior having the highest survival value.

The natural superiority of women is a biological fact, and a socially acknowledged reality.