It is my necessary breath of life to understand and expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding.
Ruth BenedictRacism is the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority.
Ruth BenedictIn 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 BenedictAn observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own. Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture.
Ruth Benedict