Ruth Benedict
We grow in time to trust the future for our answers.Collection: Future
I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world.Collection: Strength
The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.
The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that there are so many answers.
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.
Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.
I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.
A man's indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.
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.
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.
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.
Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.
I haven't strength of mind not to need a career.
I have always used the world of make-believe with a certain desperation.
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.
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.Collection: Emotional
The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.Collection: Differences
We do not see the lens through which we look.Collection: Lenses
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.Collection: Community
liberty is the one thing no man can have unless he grants it to others.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Fighting
Racism remains in the eyes of history ... merely another instance of the persecution of minorities for the advantage of those in power.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Example
The peoples of the earth are one family.Collection: Diversity
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his communityCollection: Community
Culture is not a biologically transmitted complexCollection: Culture
Racism is the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority.Collection: Racism
The arrogance of race prejudice is an arrogance which defies what is scientifically known of human races.Collection: Race
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.Collection: Japan
The trouble is not that we are never happy-it is that happiness is so episodical.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Civilization
What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.Collection: Men
Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.Collection: Spiritual
... 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.Collection: Lonely
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.Collection: Science
Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known.Collection: Civilization
It is strange how long we rebel against a platitude until suddenly in a different lingo it looms up again as the only verity.Collection: Long
. . . 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.Collection: Children
It is my necessary breath of life to understand and expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding.Collection: Expression
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?Collection: Baby
As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.Collection: Religious
The heavier our bodies, the higher our will, our spirit, rises above them.' 'The wearier we are, the more splendid the training.Collection: Training
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Race
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.Collection: Brave
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.Collection: Believe
Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.Collection: Individual
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.Collection: Enlightenment
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 meritsCollection: War
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.Collection: Success