Quotes by Ruth Benedict

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

“Japan likewise put her hopes of victory on a different basis from that prevalent in the United States. (...) Even when she was winning, her civilian statesmen, her High Command, and her soldiers re...”

“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.”

“We grow in time to trust the future for our answers.”

“Faith is the sturdiest the most manly of the virtues. It lies behind our pluckiest... strivings. It is the virtue of the storm just as happiness is the virtue of the sunshine.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Faith is the sturdiest the most manly of the virtues. It lies behind our pluckiest... strivings. It is the virtue of the storm just as happiness is the virtue of the sunshine.”

“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?”

“From the moment of his birth the customs into which [an individual] is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture.”

“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.”

“Our children are not individuals whose rights and tastes are casually respected from infancy, as they are in some primitive societies . . . . They are fundamentally extension of our own egos and gi...”

“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. In scientific language, cultu...”

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

“The tough-minded are content that differences should exist. They respect differences. Their goal is a world made safe for differences, where the United States may be American to the hilt without th...”