Ruth Benedict

Scientist

1887-06-05

Quotes by Ruth Benedict

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

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• Japan likewise put her hopes of victory on a different basis from that prevalent in the United States. (...) Even when she was winning, her civilian statesmen, her High Command, and her soldiers repeated that this was no contest between armaments; it was pitting of our faith in things against their faith in spirit.

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

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• Japan likewise put her hopes of victory on a different basis from that prevalent in the United States. (...) Even when she was winning, her civilian statesmen, her High Command, and her soldiers repeated that this was no contest between armaments; it was pitting of our faith in things against their faith in spirit.

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• I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.

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• As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.

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

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• The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

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• 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.

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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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• 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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• Traditional Anglo-Saxon intolerance is a local and temporal culture trait like any other.

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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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• We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behavior, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition.

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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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