Ashley Montagu quotes

Ashley Montagu was a British-American anthropologist and humanist, renowned for his work on race and the biological unity of humankind. His pioneering research challenged prevailing notions of racial differences and promoted the idea of equality. He advocated for human rights and contributed significantly to public discussions on science and society. Here are 23 of his 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

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

Ashley Montagu

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

Ashley Montagu

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

Ashley Montagu

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

Ashley Montagu

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

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

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

Ashley Montagu

[C]ircumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society.

Ashley Montagu

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

Ashley Montagu

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

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

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

The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.

Ashley Montagu

Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.

Ashley Montagu

The cultured man is an artist, an artist in humanity.

Ashley Montagu

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

Among both the Northern and Eastern Hamites are to be found some of the most beautiful types of humanity.

Ashley Montagu

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

Bigotry and science can have no communication with each other, for science begins where bigotry and absolute certainty end. The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof. Let us never forget that tyranny most often springs from a fanatical faith in the absoluteness of one's beliefs.

Ashley Montagu