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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.

Ruth Benedict

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Ruth Benedict
Age: 61 †
Born: 1887
Born: June 5
Died: 1948
Died: September 17
Academic
Anthropologist
Biographer
Folklorist
Librarian
Poet
Sociologist
University Teacher
New York City
New York
Ruth Fulton Benedict
Ruth Fulton
Take
Racism
Must
According
Make
Sides
World
Decision
Future
Isms
Everyone
Differ
History
Exposed
Today
Racist

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Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.
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Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.
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I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world.
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The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.
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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
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Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known.
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The trouble is not that we are never happy-it is that happiness is so episodical.
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Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex
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What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.
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Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.
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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?
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The heavier our bodies, the higher our will, our spirit, rises above them.' 'The wearier we are, the more splendid the training.
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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.
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Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular variety of behavior.
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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.
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Traditional Anglo-Saxon intolerance is a local and temporal culture trait like any other.
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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.
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... 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.
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Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.
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It is my necessary breath of life to understand and expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding.
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