Quotes by George Herbert Mead

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Society is unity in diversity.
 
Man lives in a world of meaning.
 
A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal.
 
Delayed reaction is necessary to intelligent conduct.
 
Nobody is always stupid, but everyone is stupid sometimes.
 
No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.
 
Man lives in a world of Meaning. What he sees and hears means what he will or might handle.
 
The beauty of a face is not a separate quality but a relation or proportion of qualities to each other.
 
The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.
 
Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.
 
To be interested in the public good we must be disinterested, that is, not interested in goods in which our personal selves are wrapped up.
 
The self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from other objects and from the body.
 
Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.
 
The behaviour of an individual can be understood only in terms of the behavior of the whole social group of which he is a member, since his individual acts are involved in larger, social acts which go beyond himself and which implicate the other members of that group.
 
If you ask, then, where directly in your own experience the “I” comes in, the answer is that it comes in as a historical figure. It is what you were a second ago that is the “I” of the “me.” It is another “me” that has to take that rôle. You cannot get the immediate response of the “I” in the process.
 
Intelligence is essentially the ability to solve the problems of present behavior in terms of its possible future consequences as implicated on the basis of past experience-the ability, that is, to solve the problems of present behavior in the light of, or by reference to, both the past and the future; it involves both memory and foresight.
 
Mentality on our approach simply comes in when the organism is able to point out meanings to others and to himself. This is the point at which mind appears, or if you like, emerges…. It is absurd to look at the mind simply from the standpoint of the individual human organism; for, although it has its focus there, it is essentially a social phenomenon; even its biological functions are primarily social.
 
The organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self may be called “the generalized other.” The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole community. Thus, for example, in the case of such a social group as a ball team, the team is the generalized other in so far as it enters—as an organized process or social activity—into the experience of any one of the individual members of it.
 
Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience. The point of approach which I wish to suggest is that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of communication as essential to the social order. Social psychology, on this view, presupposes an approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social structure, a social order.
 
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