"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
Montague Francis Ashley Montagu (born Israel Ehrenberg on June 28, 1905, London, Great Britain - died November 26, 1999, Princeton, New Jersey), United States was a British-American anthropologist and humanist who popularized issues such as race and gender and their relation to politics and development. He was the rapporteur, in 1950, of the UNESCO statement The Race Question. As a young man he changed his name to "Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu" and went by "Ashley Montagu" after moving to the United States.
"Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.""Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.""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.""One goes through school, college, medical school and one's internship learning little or nothing about goodness but a good deal about success.""Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.""The cultured man is an artist, an artist in humanity.""The deepest human defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.""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.""The idea is to die young as late as possible.""The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.""The natural superiority of women is a biological fact, and a socially acknowledged reality.""The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.""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."
According to a 1995 interview by Leonard Lieberman, Andrew Lyons and Hariet Lyons in Current Anthropology, Montagu grew up in London's East End. Like many other children, he was often subjected to antisemitic assaults when he ventured from his own Jewish neighborhood. He developed an interest in anatomy very early and as a boy was befriended by Arthur Keith. In 1922, at the age of 17, he entered University College London, where he received a diploma in psychology after studying with Karl Pearson and C.E. Spearman and taking anthropology courses with Grafton Elliot Smith and Charles Gabriel Seligman. He also studied at the London School of Economics, where he became one of the first students of Bronis?aw Malinowski. He pursued postgraduate work at Columbia University, where he produced a dissertation in 1936 entitled Coming into being among the Australian Aborigines: A study of the procreative beliefs of the native tribes of Australia which was directed by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. He taught anatomy at various schools in the United States before becoming a professor of anthropology at Rutgers from 1949 to 1955.
In the 1950s Montagu produced a series of works questioning the validity of race as a biological concept, including the UNESCO Statement on Race and his very well-known Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. He was particularly opposed to the work of Carleton S. Coon. In 1952, together with William Vogt, he gave the first Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, inaugurating the series.
He retired from his academic career in 1955 and moved to Princeton, New Jersey to pursue his popular writing and public appearances. He became a well-known guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. He directed his numerous published studies on the significant relationship of mother and infant to the general public. The humanizing effects of touch informed the studies of isolation-reared monkeys and adult pathological violence that is the subject of his Time-Life documentary "Rock A Bye Baby" (1970).
Later in life, Montagu actively opposed genital modification and mutilation of children. In 1994, James Prescott, Ph.D., wrote and named in honor of Dr. Montagu, who was one of its original signers, the Ashley Montagu Resolution to End the Genital Mutilation of Children Worldwide: A Petition to the World Court, The Hague.
In 1995, the American Humanist Association named him the Humanist of the Year.
Montagu, who became a naturalized American citizen in 1940, taught and lectured at Harvard, Princeton University, Rutgers University, the University of California, and New York University. He wrote over 60 books.
The Direction of Human Development: Biological and Social Bases
Culture and human development
The Nature of Human Aggression
The Natural Superiority of Women
Race and IQ
Living and Loving
The Anatomy of Swearing
The Human Connection
The Peace of The World
The Fallacy of Race (1942)
Human Evolution
Anthropology and Human Nature
The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity. (1942)
The Cultured Man
Man: His first Million Years
Human Heredity
Montagu wrote the Foreword and Bibliography of the 1955 edition (reprinted 2005) of A Factor of Evolution by Petr Kropotkin, and in 1956, he edited , a critique of Arnold J. Toynbee's seminal A Study of History.
He is co-author with Floyd Matson of The Human Connection and The Dehumanization of Man. He is the writer and director of the film One World or None, described as one of the best documentaries ever made.
"Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof".
"The natural superiority of women is a biological fact, and a socially acknowledged reality".
"The idea is to die young as late as possible".
"... circumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society" ... in Mutilated Humanity
"The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness" - said to Johnny Carson during a book-promoting appearance of the latest edition of his book The Natural Superiority of Women.
"The Eskimos live among ice all their lives but have no single word for ice." - from Man: His first Million Years, this quote begins the penultimate chapter of Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
"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. Growing Young (Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1989), p. 120.
Footage of Ashley Montagu talking with Charlton Heston about his character in the movie appears as a bonus in the special DVD edition of The Omega Man. Archive footage of him, among others (including Carl Sagan), is also featured in The X-Files episode Gethsemane.