Ruth Benedict Quotes

The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.

We do not see the lens through which we look.

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.

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.

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

The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.

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

I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.

liberty is the one thing no man can have unless he grants it to others.

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.

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

An observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own. Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture.

The peoples of the earth are one family.

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex

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

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.

A man's indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.

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.

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

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

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.

The trouble is not that we are never happy-it is that happiness is so episodical.

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

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

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