Ruth Benedict - Patterns of Culture (1934)

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

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

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

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

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
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