Ruth Benedict Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Ruth Benedict
Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.

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
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
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.

Ruth Benedict
The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the scientists.

Ruth Benedict
Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular variety of behavior.

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

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
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
The mere fact of leaving ultimate social control in the hands of the people has not guaranteed that men will be able to conduct their lives as free men. Those societies where men know they are free are often democracies, but sometimes they have strong chiefs and kings.they have, however, one common characteristic: they are all alike in making certain freedoms common to all citizens, and inalienable.

Ruth Benedict
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?

Ruth Benedict
Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whose social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us.

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
Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known.

Ruth Benedict
War is, we have been forced to admit, even in the face of its huge place in our civilization, an asocial trait.

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
In a day of footloose movements of people and of mixed marriages in the ancestry of the most desirable elements of the community we preach unabashed the gospel of the pure race.

Ruth Benedict
The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways.

Ruth Benedict
.. 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.

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
As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.

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

Ruth Benedict
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.

Ruth Benedict
Our national experience in Americanizing millions of Europeans whose chief wish was to become Americans has been a heady wine which has made us believe, as perhaps no nation before us has ever believed, that, given the slimmest chance, all peoples will pattern themselves upon our model.

Ruth Benedict
What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.

Ruth Benedict
The trouble is not that we are never happy — it is that happiness is so episodical.

Ruth Benedict