68 Quotes by Ruth Benedict

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.

... with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding of that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger--and it would be fatal to world peace--is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.

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

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

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

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex

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.

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

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.