55+ Ruth Benedict Quotes On Culture, Cultural Anthropology And World

Ruth Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City in 1887 and studied at Columbia University. Benedict is best known for her studies of Native American cultures, particularly her groundbreaking work Patterns of Culture, which helped to revolutionize the field of anthropology. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ruth Benedict on culture, cultural anthropology, world.

Top 10 Ruth Benedict Quotes

1. The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.
2. I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. A man's indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.
6. Racism remains in the eyes of history ... merely another instance of the persecution of minorities for the advantage of those in power.
7. Racism is the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority.
8. Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex
9. 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.
10. The arrogance of race prejudice is an arrogance which defies what is scientifically known of human races.

Ruth Benedict Short Quotes

• Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.
• We do not see the lens through which we look.
• The peoples of the earth are one family.
• I haven't strength of mind not to need a career.
• We grow in time to trust the future for our answers.
• The trouble is not that we are never happy-it is that happiness is so episodical.
• liberty is the one thing no man can have unless he grants it to others.
• Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.
• Virtue begins when we dedicate ourselves actively to the job of gratitude.
• Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.

Ruth Benedict Quotes About Culture

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

In world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture. — Ruth Benedict

Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whose social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us. — Ruth Benedict

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

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

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

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

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

Ruth Benedict Quotes About World

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

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

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. — Ruth Benedict

In a world that holds books and babies and canyon trails, why should one condemn oneself to live day-in, day-out with people one does not like, and sell oneself to chaperone and correct them? — Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict Famous Quotes And Sayings

Our national experience in Americanizing millions of Europeans whose chief wish was to become Americans has been a heady wine which has made us believe, as perhaps no nation before us has ever believed, that, given the slimmest chance, all peoples will pattern themselves upon our model. — 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

... it is a commonplace that men like war. For peace, in our society, with the feeling we have then that it is feeble-minded to strive except for one's own private profit, is a lonely thing and a hazardous business. Over and over men have proved that they prefer the hazards of war with all its suffering. It has its compensations. — Ruth Benedict

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

The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways. — 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

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

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

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

So much of the trouble is because I am a woman. To me it seems a very terrible thing to be a woman. There is one crown which perhaps is worth it all--a great love, a quiet home, and children. We all know that is all that is worthwhile, and yet we must peg away, showing off our wares on the market if we have money, or manufacturing careers for ourselves if we haven't. — 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 prime lesson the social sciences can learn from the natural sciences is just this: that it is necessary to press on to find the positive conditions under which desired events take place, and that these can be just as scientifically investigated as can instances of negative correlation. This problem is beyond relativity. — Ruth Benedict

. . . work even when I'm satisfied with it is never my child I love nor my servant I've brought to heel. It's always busy work I do with my left hand, and part of me watches grudging the wastes of a lifetime. — Ruth Benedict

The mere fact of leaving ultimate social control in the hands of the people has not guaranteed that men will be able to conduct their lives as free men. Those societies where men know they are free are often democracies, but sometimes they have strong chiefs and kings.they have, however, one common characteristic: they are all alike in making certain freedoms common to all citizens, and inalienable. — 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 my necessary breath of life to understand and expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding. — 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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Ruth Benedict

1. Ruth Benedict taught us to be open to new ideas and to think critically about the world around us. She also showed us the importance of understanding and respecting different cultures and beliefs. Finally, she demonstrated the power of education and hard work to achieve success.