Ruth Benedict Quotes

The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the scientists.

The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.

Culture, with its processes and functions, is a subject upon which we need all the enlightenment we can achieve, and there is no direction in which we can seek with greater reward than in the facts of pre-literate societies.

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

... 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.

Racism remains in the eyes of history ... merely another instance of the persecution of minorities for the advantage of those in power.

Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whose social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us.

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.

It is my necessary breath of life to understand and expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding.

Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.