| The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996. |
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| NUMBER: | 38575 |
| QUOTATION: | As for the peasant populations of a great part of the world, they aren’t so much anxious as hungry. They aren’t anxious about whether they will get a salary raise, or which of the three colleges of their choice they will be admitted to, or whether to buy a Ford or Cadillac, or whether the kind of TV set they want is too expensive. They are hungry, cold and, in many parts of the world, they dread that local warfare, bandits, political coups may endanger their homes, their meager livelihoods and their lives. But surely they are not anxious. For anxiety, as we have come to use it to describe our characteristic state of mind, can be contrasted with the active fear of hunger, loss, violence and death. Anxiety is the appropriate emotion when the immediate personal terror—of a volcano, an arrow, the sorcerer’s spell, a stab in the back and other calamities, all directed against one’s self—disappears. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Margaret Mead (1901–1978), U.S. anthropologist. “One Vote for This Age of Anxiety,” sect. VI, New York Times (May 20, 1956). |
| BIOGRAPHY: | Columbia Encyclopedia. |
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| | | The Columbia World of Quotations. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. |
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