68 Quotes by Ruth Benedict

Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.

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

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

The peoples of the earth are one family.

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.

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.

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.

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

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