Ashley Montagu famous quotes

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

#Happiness #Happy #Surprise

The idea is to die young as late as possible.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Death #Ideas #Young

The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. 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 things whatsoever.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Animal #People #Evil

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Success #Work #Differences

By virtue of being born to humanity, every human being has a right to the development and fulfillment of his potentialities as a human being.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Humanity #Development #Virtue

The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe, don't read what they write, don't ask what they believe, just observe what they do.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Believe #Writing #People

The Good Book - one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Book #Good Book #Remarkable

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Science #Doctors #Disease

In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Education #Teaching #Messages

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Science #Proof #Certainty

To admit ignorance is to exhibit wisdom.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Ignorance

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

#Travel #Home #America

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!
-- Ashley Montagu

#Heart #Fate #Enemy

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Race #Racism #Feminist

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

#Play #Mental Health #Criteria

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

#Life #Well Being #Communicate

The cultured man is an artist, an artist in humanity.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Artist #Men #Humanity

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Love #Sleep #Men

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

#Women #Men #Evidence

Stand still, close your eyes and listen; in the silence you can hear the cries of pain and low moans of anguish of animals waiting to die... do everything you can even if today it is just one small thing. There are no excuses for inaction, despair, egotism, or petulance that matter to the animals.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Pain #Eye #Animal

It is not the most lovable individuals who stand more in need of love, but the most unlovable
-- Ashley Montagu

#Needs #Lovable #Individual

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

#Personality #Purpose #Purpose Of Life

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

Intellect without humanity is not good enough...what the world is suffering from at the present time is not so much an overabundance of intellect as an insufficiency of humanity.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Time #Not Good Enough #Humanity

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Individuality #Should #Refinement

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
-- Ashley Montagu

#Men #Principles #Culture

It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Years #Doe #Delight

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Nature #Names #Able

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#School #Caring #Lines

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

#School #College #Littles

Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Swag #Cities #Pockets

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Girl #Boys #Irritation

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

#Women #Reality #Facts

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

#Country #Loneliness #Together

The basic fact is simple: life begins not at birth, but conception.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Simple #Abortion #Facts

Hatred is love frustrated.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Hatred #Frustrated

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Writing #Men #Needs

Today, while the titular head of the family may still be the father, everyone knows that he is little more than chairman, at most, of the entertainment committee.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Father #May #Littles

The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Believe #Religion #Atheism

I want to die young at a ripe old age.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Age #Want #Aging

You certainly can't tell anything from the microscopic structure of the brain whether the person was an idiot or a genius.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Brain #Genius #Idiot

Ircumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Mutilation #Justification #Ritual

The only measure of what you believe is what you do.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Believe #Deeds

...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...
-- Ashley Montagu

#People #Ancestry #Jew

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Children #Integrity #Frustration

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Believe #Degrees #Fundamentals

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Journey #Self #Age

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

#Systematic #Mental Illness #Institutions

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

#Ice #Single Word

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Mother #Baby #Emotional

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

#Dream #Attitude #Thinking

Man is the only 150 pound nonlinear servomechanism that can be wholly reproduced by unskilled labor.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Men #Pounds #Nonlinear

The world is so full of wonderful things we should all, if we were taught how to appreciate it, be far richer than kings.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Kings #Appreciate #World

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Communication #Media #Community

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.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Quality #Bases #Humans

It is the function of women to teach men how to be human.
-- Ashley Montagu

#Men #Function #Teach