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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.

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
Wells
Moral
Complement
Human
Values
Capacities
Humans
Culture
Selected
Well
Others
Developed
Always
Another
Mental
Certain
Capacity
May
Emotional
Stifled
Ever
System
Potentialities

More quotes by Ruth Benedict

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Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.
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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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. . . 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.
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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.
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The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.
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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.
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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
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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.
Ruth Benedict
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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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The trouble is not that we are never happy-it is that happiness is so episodical.
Ruth Benedict
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Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.
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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Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular variety of behavior.
Ruth Benedict
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I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world.
Ruth Benedict
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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.
Ruth Benedict
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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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Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.
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 peoples of the earth are one family.
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