Ruth Benedict Quotes
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The peoples of the earth are one family.
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The psychological consequences of this spread of white culture have been out of all proportion to the materialistic. This world-wide cultural diffusion has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples; it has given to our culture a massive universality that we have long ceased to account for historically, and which we read off rather as necessary and inevitable.
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Racism is the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority.
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The tough-minded ... respect difference. Their goal is a world made safe for differences, where the United States may be American to the hilt without threatening the peace of the world, and France may be France, and Japan may be Japan on the same conditions.
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I haven't strength of mind not to need a career.
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Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.
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Culture, with its processes and functions, is a subject upon which we need all the enlightenment we can achieve, and there is no direction in which we can seek with greater reward than in the facts of pre-literate societies.
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Racism remains in the eyes of history ... merely another instance of the persecution of minorities for the advantage of those in power.
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Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.
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liberty is the one thing no man can have unless he grants it to others.
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The happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and deeply felt good, and against some greatly scorned evil.
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The arrogance of race prejudice is an arrogance which defies what is scientifically known of human races.
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It is my necessary breath of life to understand and expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding.
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I have always used the world of make-believe with a certain desperation.
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In a world that holds books and babies and canyon trails, why should one condemn oneself to live day-in, day-out with people one does not like, and sell oneself to chaperone and correct them?
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No one culture has ever developed all human potentialities; it has always selected certain capacities, mental and emotional and moral, and stifled others. Each culture is a system of values which may well complement the values in another.
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It is strange how long we rebel against a platitude until suddenly in a different lingo it looms up again as the only verity.
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I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.
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. . . work even when I'm satisfied with it is never my child I love nor my servant I've brought to heel. It's always busy work I do with my left hand, and part of me watches grudging the wastes of a lifetime.
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... it is a commonplace that men like war. For peace, in our society, with the feeling we have then that it is feeble-minded to strive except for one's own private profit, is a lonely thing and a hazardous business. Over and over men have proved that they prefer the hazards of war with all its suffering. It has its compensations.
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Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the enormous malleability of their original endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born. It does not matter whether, with the Northwest Coast, it requires delusions of self-reference, or with our own civilization the amassing of possessions. In any case the great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them.
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If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits
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... oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love--not this efficient, philanthropic self.
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The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.
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I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world.
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Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex
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We do not see the lens through which we look.
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Virtue begins when we dedicate ourselves actively to the job of gratitude.
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The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.
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War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.
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Related Authors
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Alfred L. Kroeber Anthropologist -
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Emile Durkheim Sociologist -
Claude Levi-Strauss Anthropologist -
Bronislaw Malinowski Anthropologist -
Margaret Mead Cultural Anthropologist -
Erik Erikson Psychologist -
Edward Sapir Anthropologist -
Margaret Sanger Activist -
Talcott Parsons Sociologist -
Marvin Harris Anthropologist -
Gregory Bateson Anthropologist -
Clifford Geertz Anthropologist -
Lewis Henry Morgan Former Member of the New York State Senate -
Franz Boas Anthropologist -
Mary Catherine Bateson Writer -
Edward Burnett Tylor Anthropologist -
Ralph Linton Anthropologist -
G. Stanley Hall Psychologist -
George H. Mead Philosopher