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Ruth Benedict Quotes about Culture

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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

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
Emotional, Culture, May
Ruth Benedict (2011). “An Anthropologist at Work”, p.441, Transaction Publishers

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

Ruth Benedict
Differences, Culture, Humans

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.

Ruth Benedict
Community, Culture, Shapes
Patterns of Culture ch. 1 (1934)

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.

Ruth Benedict
Example, Generations, Culture

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex

Ruth Benedict
Culture, Complexes
Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.39, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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
Enlightenment, Needs, Culture
Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

Ruth Benedict
Culture, Intolerance, Anglo Saxon
Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.36, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the scientists.

Ruth Benedict
Opposites, Humanity, Culture
Ruth Benedict (2011). “An Anthropologist at Work”, p.470, Transaction Publishers

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