Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Ruth Benedict
Ruth Benedict -
Patterns of Culture (1934)
18 Sourced Quotes
View all Ruth Benedict Quotes
Source
Report...
Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.
Ruth Benedict
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.
Ruth Benedict
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.
Ruth Benedict
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
War is, we have been forced to admit, even in the face of its huge place in our civilization, an asocial trait.
Ruth Benedict
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular variety of behavior.
Ruth Benedict
Source
Report...
Traditional Anglo-Saxon intolerance is a local and temporal culture trait like any other.
Ruth Benedict
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Ruth Benedict
Creative Commons
Born:
June 5, 1887
Died:
September 17, 1948
(aged 61)
More about Ruth Benedict...
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes