Women Academics From The United States

"When art separates this thick tangle of feelings, love bares its bones."

"It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."

"So much of our life passes in a comfortable blur. Living on the senses requires an easily triggered sense of marvel, a little extra energy, and most people are lazy about life. Life is something that happens to them while they wait for death."

"Not everything we feel is felt powerfully enough to send a message to the brain; the rest of the sensations just wash over us, telling us nothing. Much is lost in translation, or is censored, and in any case our nerves don’t all fire at once. Some of them remain silent while others respond. This makes our version of the world somewhat simplistic, given how complex the world is. The body’s quest isn’t for truth, it’s for survival."

"In the Bible, God instructs Moses to burn incense sweet and to His liking. Does God have nostrils? How can a god prefer one smell of this earth to another? The rudiments of decay complete a cycle necessary for growth and deliverance. Carrion smells offensive to us, but delicious to those animals who rely on it for food. What they excrete will make the soil rich and the crops abundant. There is no need for divine election. Perception is itself a form of grace."

"Out-of-body experiences aim to shed the senses, but they cannot. One may see from a new perspective, but it’s still an experience of vision."

"My muse is male, has the silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly."

"I don't want to be a passenger in my own life."

"Most of all, the twentieth century will be remembered as the time when we first began to understand what our address was. The “big, beautiful, blue, wet ball” of recent years is one way to say it. But a more profound way will speak of the orders of magnitude of that bigness, the shades of that blueness, the arbitrary delicacy of beauty itself, the ways in which water has made life possible, and the fragile euphoria of the complex ecosystem that is Earth, an Earth on which, from space, there are no visible fences, or military zones, or national borders."

"For large minds, the Earth is a small place. Not small enough to exhaust in one lifetime, but a compact home, cozy, buoyant, a place to cherish, the spectral center of our life. But how could we stay at home forever?"

"We may pretend that beauty is only skin deep, but Aristotle was right when he observed that "beauty is a far greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.” The sad truth is that attractive people do better in school, where they receive more help, better grades, and less punishment; at work, where they are rewarded with higher pay, more prestigious jobs, and faster promotions; in finding mates, where they tend to be in control of the relationships and make most of the decisions; and among total strangers, who assume them to be interesting, honest, virtuous, and successful. After all, in fairy tales, the first stories most of us hear, the heroes are handsome, the heroines are beautiful, and the wicked sots are ugly. Children learn implicitly that good people are beautiful and bad people are ugly, and society restates that message in many subtle ways as they grow older. So perhaps it’s not surprising that handsome cadets at West Point achieve a higher rank by the time they graduate, or that a judge is more likely to give an attractive criminal a shorter sentence."

"That evening, as I watched the sunset’s pinwheels of apricot and mauve slowly explode into red ribbons, I thought: The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on."

"The color we see is always the one being reflected, the one that doesn’t stay put and get absorbed. We see the rejected color, and say “an apple is red.” But in truth an apple is everything but red."

"Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret: You are looking into a predator’s eyes. Most predators have eyes set right on the front of their heads, so they can use binocular vision to sight and track their prey."

"We hallucinate sounds more often than sights. There are auditory mirages, which vanish without trace; auditory illusions that turn out to be something other than they seemed; and, of course, voices that speak to saints, seers, and psychotics, telling them how to act and what to believe."

"Though it has a certain Russian-roulette quality to it, eating fugu is considered a highly aesthetic experience. That makes one wonder about the condition that we, in chauvinistic shorthand, referred to as “human.” Creatures who will one day vanish from the earth in the ultimate subtraction of sensuality that we call death, we spend our lives courting death, fomenting wars, watching sickening horror movies in which maniacs slash and torture their victims, hurrying our own deaths in fast cars, cigarette smoking, suicide. Death obsesses us, as well it might, but our response to it is so strange. Faced with tornadoes chewing up homes, with dust storms ruining crops, floods and earthquakes swallowing up whole cities, with ghostly diseases that gnaw at one’s bone marrow, cripple, or craze—rampant miseries that need no special bidding, but come freely, giving their horror like alms—you’d think human beings would hold out against the forces of Nature, combine their efforts and become allies, not create devastation of their own, not add to one another’s miseries. Death does such fine work without us. How strange that people, whole countries sometimes, wish to be its willing accomplices."

"The Dutch carried vanilla to Indonesia, and the British to India. “Tincture of vanilla” didn’t appear in the United States until the 1800s, but when it did, it appealed to the American impatience and aversion to fuss, that sprint through life whose byword is convenience. Europeans use the vanilla bean, luxuriating in its textures, tastes, and aromas, but we preferred it reduced and already bottled. By the nineteenth century, demand flourished, vanilla became synthesized, and the world floated on a mantle of cheap flavoring."

"But we rarely taste the real thing. The vanilla flavoring we buy in the spice section of grocery stores, the vanilla we find in most of our ice creams, cakes, yogurts, and other foods, as well as in shampoos and perfumes, is an artificial flavor created in laboratories and mixed with alcohol and other ingredients. Marshall McLuhan once warned us that we were drifting so far away from the real taste of life that we had begun to prefer artificiality, and were becoming content with eating the menu descriptions rather than the food."

"But, as sages have long said, the sexiest part of the body and the best aphrodisiac in the world is the imagination."

"Consciousness, the great poem of matter, seems so unlikely, so impossible, and yet here we are with our loneliness and our giant dreams."

"We tend to see our distant past through a reverse telescope that compresses it: a short time as hunter-gatherers, a long time as "civilized" people. But civilization is a recent stage of human life, and, for all we know, it may not be any great achievement. It may not even be the final stage. We have been alive on this planet as recognizable humans for about two million years, and for all but the last two or three thousand we’ve been hunter-gatherers. We may sing in choirs and park our rages behind a desk, but we patrol the world with many of a hunter-gatherer’s drives, motives, and skills. These aren’t knowable truths. Should an alien civilization ever contact us, the greatest gift they could give us would be a set of home movies: films of our species at each stage in our evolution."

"What I’m really wondering is why notices were posted and invitations sent out at all: If it’s a psychics’ convention, shouldn’t everyone just know where and when to meet?"

"Why humans feel pain has been the subject of theological debate, philosophical schisms, psychoanalytical edicts, and mumbo jumbo for centuries. Pain was the punishment for wrongdoing in the Garden of Eden. Pain was the price one paid for not being morally perfect. Pain was a self-affliction brought about by sexual repression. Pain was dished out by vengeful gods, or was the result of falling out of harmony with nature…The purpose of pain is to warn the body about possible injury. Millions of free nerve endings alarm us; whenever they’re hit, we feel pain."

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

"I [Paul Brand] was soon to be reminded of a lecture given by anthropologist Margaret Mead, who spent much of her life studying primitive cultures. She asked the question, "What is the earliest sign of civilization?" A clay pot? Iron? Tools? Agriculture? No, she claimed. To her, evidence of the earliest true civilization was a healed femur, a leg bone, which she held up before us in the lecture hall. She explained that such healings were never found in the remains of competitive, savage societies. There, clues of violence abounded: temples pierced by arrows, skulls crushed by clubs. But the healed femur showed that someone must have cared for the injured person—hunted on his behalf, brought him food, and served him at personal sacrifice. Savage societies could not afford such pity."

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

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

"Marriages held together solely by desire are by definition unpredictable; as thrice-married Margaret Mead once blurted out to psychologist and divorce counselor Judith S. Wallerstein, "Judy, there is no society in the world where people have stayed married without enormous community pressure to do so.""

"we may protest that women's small contribution to culture doesn't indicate a lack of capacity but merely reflects the way men have contrived things to be: we can blame women's small place in culture on culture. But this leaves unanswered the question of why it is that over so many hundreds of years women have consented to follow the male dictate and allowed men to fashion the culture according to male design. It also leaves unanswered the even more fundamental question of why it is that in every society which has ever been studied-so Margaret Mead tells us-whatever is the occupation of men has the greater prestige"

"Margaret Mead describes us as a "third generation" society. She does not mean, of course, that we are all the grandchildren of pioneers and immigrants; but she does mean that our parents shared the attitudes of the children of foreigners, who because of their strange families, with their old-country ways, their effusive gestures, the flavor of their speech, leaned over backward to rule out any foreignness, any color at all. We suffer from that background, with its hunger for uniformity, the shared norm of ambition and habit and living standard. The repressive codes are everywhere."

"Margaret Mead was probably the most famous anthropologist of her time, and even more probably the most controversial. Author of more than fifteen hundred books, articles, films, and occasional pieces; a tireless public speaker traveling the world to instruct and persuade; a field researcher of extraordinarily extensive and varied experience; a hyperactive organizer of projects, conferences, programs, and careers; and possessed of a seemingly endless fund of opinions on every subject under the sun that she was all too willing to share with anyone who asked, and many who did not; she left no one who came into contact with her or her works indifferent to either."

"Mead's anthropology had many other red, white and blue- blooded virtues. One was the common anthropological conceit, out of which she made a career, to the effect that the ultimate value of studying other cultures was the use we could make of them to reconstruct our own – a heady kind of intellectual imperialism, as if the final meaning of others' lives was their significance for us."

"Margaret Mead was both a student of civilization and an exemplar of it. To a public of millions, she brought the central insight of cultural anthropology: that varying cultural patterns express an underlying human unity. She mastered her discipline, but she also transcended it. Intrepid, independent, plain spoken, fearless, she remains a model for the young and a teacher from whom all may learn."

"She (Judith Plaskow) and Martha Ackelsberg are fond of quoting Margaret Mead's words: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has""

"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."

"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."

"I learned the value of hard work by working hard."

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

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

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

"I think extreme heterosexuality is a perversion."

"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."

"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."

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

"A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again."

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

"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."

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

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

"Throughout history, females have picked providers for mates. Males pick anything."