Ruth Benedict Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Ruth Benedict
The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.

Ruth Benedict
In world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture. In scientific language, culture is not a function of race.

Ruth Benedict
Faith…is the virtue of the storm just as happiness is the virtue of the sunshine.

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
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.

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

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
The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that there are so many answers.

Ruth Benedict
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community

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

Ruth Benedict
Racism is the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority.

Ruth Benedict
Liberty is the one thing no man can have unless he grants it to others.

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

Ruth Benedict
It is strange how long we rebel against a platitude until suddenly in a different lingo it looms up again as the only verity.

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