The tough-minded ... respect difference. Their goal is a world made safe for differences, where the United States may be American to the hilt without threatening the peace of the world, and France may be France, and Japan may be Japan on the same conditions.

It is strange how long we rebel against a platitude until suddenly in a different lingo it looms up again as the only verity.

The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.

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.

In world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture.

Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.

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