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

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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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What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.
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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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... 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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Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.
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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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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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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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The peoples of the earth are one family.
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liberty is the one thing no man can have unless he grants it to others.
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Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.
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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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Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex
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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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The trouble is not that we are never happy-it is that happiness is so episodical.
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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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Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular variety of behavior.
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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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... 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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The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.
Ruth Benedict