Top 35 Ruth Benedict Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “The peoples of the earth are one family.”

— Ruth Benedict

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

— Ruth Benedict

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

— Ruth Benedict

5. “We do not see the lens through which we look.”

— Ruth Benedict

6. “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

7. “What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.”

— Ruth Benedict

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

— Ruth Benedict

9. “I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world.”

— Ruth Benedict

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

— Ruth Benedict

11. “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

12. “War is, we have been forced to admit, even in the face of its huge place in our civilization, an asocial trait.”

— Ruth Benedict

13. “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

14. “Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.”

— Ruth Benedict

15. “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

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

— Ruth Benedict

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

— Ruth Benedict

18. “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

19. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Ruth Benedict

21. “Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.”

— Ruth Benedict

22. “I have always used the world of make-believe with a certain desperation.”

— Ruth Benedict

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “I haven’t strength of mind not to need a career.”

— Ruth Benedict

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

— Ruth Benedict

30. “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

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

— Ruth Benedict

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.”

— Ruth Benedict

37. “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

38. “The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accomodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior.”

— Ruth Benedict

39. “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