Ruth Benedict Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

View all Ruth Benedict Quotes
Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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