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

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
Committed
Constitution
Behavior
Particular
Men
Biological
Detail
Variety
Details

More quotes by Ruth Benedict

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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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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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Traditional Anglo-Saxon intolerance is a local and temporal culture trait like any other.
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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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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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Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.
Ruth Benedict
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The peoples of the earth are one family.
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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.
Ruth Benedict
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liberty is the one thing no man can have unless he grants it to others.
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We grow in time to trust the future for our answers.
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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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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
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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.
Ruth Benedict
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... 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
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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.
Ruth Benedict
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The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.
Ruth Benedict
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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.
Ruth Benedict
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The trouble is not that we are never happy-it is that happiness is so episodical.
Ruth Benedict
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Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex
Ruth Benedict
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Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.
Ruth Benedict