Ruth Benedict Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

We grow in time to trust the future for our answers.

Ruth Benedict
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.

Ruth Benedict
I have always used the world of make-believe with a certain desperation.

Ruth Benedict
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.

Ruth Benedict
Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.

Ruth Benedict
Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.

Ruth Benedict
I long to speak out about the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women. They have made of their lives an intense adventure.

Ruth Benedict
The prime lesson the social sciences can learn from the natural sciences is just this: that it is necessary to press on to find the positive conditions under which desired events take place, and that these can be just as scientifically investigated as can instances of negative correlation. This problem is beyond relativity.

Ruth Benedict
I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world.

Ruth Benedict
Traditional Anglo-Saxon intolerance is a local and temporal culture trait like any other.

Ruth Benedict
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.

Ruth Benedict
Our children are not individuals whose rights and tastes are casually respected from infancy, as they are in some primitive societies.... They are fundamentally extensions of our own egos and give a special opportunity for the display of authority.

Ruth Benedict
Racism remains in the eyes of history... merely another instance of the persecution of minorities for the advantage of those in power.

Ruth Benedict
From the moment of his birth, the customs into which [an individual] is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture.

Ruth Benedict
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.

Ruth Benedict
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.

Ruth Benedict
The heavier our bodies, the higher our will, our spirit, rises above them.' 'The wearier we are, the more splendid the training.

Ruth Benedict
So much of the trouble is because I am a woman. To me it seems a very terrible thing to be a woman. There is one crown which perhaps is worth it all--a great love, a quiet home, and children. We all know that is all that is worthwhile, and yet we must peg away, showing off our wares on the market if we have money, or manufacturing careers for ourselves if we haven't.

Ruth Benedict
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.

Ruth Benedict
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.

Ruth Benedict
Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.

Ruth Benedict
It is my necessary breath of life to understand and expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding.

Ruth Benedict
The arrogance of race prejudice is an arrogance which defies what is scientifically known of human races.

Ruth Benedict
The largesse
Of all our love is a down-curving arc
That ends in sleeping, lest we rouse to mark
How all our fires go out in nothingness.

Ruth Benedict
We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behavior, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition.

Ruth Benedict