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

Categorized in : Believe Wish Wine

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

Ruth Benedict

safety differences science

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

Ruth Benedict

strong-women motivational inspirational

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

eye men thinking

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 shapes 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

emotional may culture

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

Ruth Benedict

arrogance racism race

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.

Ruth Benedict

excitement fighting evil

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

generations example culture

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.

Ruth Benedict

decision racism history

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

Ruth Benedict

gratitude jobs men

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

Ruth Benedict

minorities eye racism

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

white men civilization

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

Ruth Benedict

educational answers life

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex

Ruth Benedict

complexes culture

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

Ruth Benedict

liberty freedom men

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

japan differences goal

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

Ruth Benedict

inferiority groups racism

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

Ruth Benedict

trouble happiness

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

Ruth Benedict

future faith memorable

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

earth play war