Ruth Benedict famous quotes

03-28-2025

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

#Strong Women #Inspiration #Long
The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Differences #Safety #Purpose
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
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

#Fighting #Evil #Excitement
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
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

#War #Bears #Merit
Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Memorable #Long
We grow in time to trust the future for our answers.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Answers #Aging #Grows
War is, we have been forced to admit, even in the face of its huge place in our civilization, an asocial trait.
-- Ruth Benedict

#War #Traits
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

#Justification
... 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.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Country #Fall #Ignorance
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

#Civilization #Historical #Groups
So much of the trouble is because I am a woman. To me it seems a very terrible thing to be a woman. There is one crown which perhaps is worth it all--a great love, a quiet home, and children. We all know that is all that is worthwhile, and yet we must peg away, showing off our wares on the market if we have money, or manufacturing careers for ourselves if we haven't.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Marriage #Children #Home
... oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love--not this efficient, philanthropic self.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Writing #Self #Giving
The prime lesson the social sciences can learn from the natural sciences is just this: that it is necessary to press on to find the positive conditions under which desired events take place, and that these can be just as scientifically investigated as can instances of negative correlation. This problem is beyond relativity.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Science #Events #Negative
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

#Believe #Wine #Wish
The mere fact of leaving ultimate social control in the hands of the people has not guaranteed that men will be able to conduct their lives as free men. Those societies where men know they are free are often democracies, but sometimes they have strong chiefs and kings.they have, however, one common characteristic: they are all alike in making certain freedoms common to all citizens, and inalienable.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Strong #Kings #Freedom
. . . work even when I'm satisfied with it is never my child I love nor my servant I've brought to heel. It's always busy work I do with my left hand, and part of me watches grudging the wastes of a lifetime.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Children #Hands #Watches
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

#Brave #Loyal #Way
... it is a commonplace that men like war. For peace, in our society, with the feeling we have then that it is feeble-minded to strive except for one's own private profit, is a lonely thing and a hazardous business. Over and over men have proved that they prefer the hazards of war with all its suffering. It has its compensations.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Lonely #Peace #War
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

#Success #Attitude #Race
What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Men #Ideas #Together
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

#Enlightenment #Rewards #Facts
Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular variety of behavior.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Men #Details #Constitution
The heavier our bodies, the higher our will, our spirit, rises above them.' 'The wearier we are, the more splendid the training.
-- Ruth Benedict

#Training #Body #Spirit

You may also like:

Alfred L. Kroeber
Anthropologist
Benjamin Lee Whorf
Bronislaw Malinowski
Anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss
Anthropologist
Clifford Geertz
Anthropologist
Edward Burnett Tylor
Anthropologist
Edward Sapir
Anthropologist
Emile Durkheim
Sociologist
Erik Erikson
Psychologist
Franz Boas
Anthropologist
G. Stanley Hall
Psychologist
George H. Mead
Philosopher
Gregory Bateson
Anthropologist
Lewis Henry Morgan
Former Member of the New York State Senate
Margaret Mead
Cultural Anthropologist
Margaret Sanger
Activist
Marvin Harris
Anthropologist
Mary Catherine Bateson
Writer
Ralph Linton
Anthropologist
Talcott Parsons
Sociologist