I did not write it [Coming of Age in Samoa] as a popular book, but only with the hope that it would be intelligible to those who might make the best use of its theme, that adolescence need not be the time of stress and strain which Western society made it; that growing up could be freer and easier and less complicated; and also that there were prices to pay for the very lack of complication I found in Samoa - less intensity, less individuality, less involvement with life.

It is typical, in America, that a person's hometown is not the place where he is living now but is the place he left behind.

Somehow, we have to get older people back close to growing children if we are to restore a sense of community, acquire knowledge of the past, and provide a sense of the future.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

today's children are the first generation to grow up in a world that has the power to destroy itself.

If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.

An education not founded on Art will never succeed.