Ruth Benedict Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.

  Ruth Benedict

  Men, Ideas, Together

  Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.41, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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.

  Ruth Benedict

  Opposites, Humanity, Culture

  Ruth Benedict (2011). “An Anthropologist at Work”, p.470, Transaction Publishers

• Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex

  Ruth Benedict

  Culture, Complexes

  Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.39, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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.

  Ruth Benedict

  Race, Diversity, Brotherhood

  Ruth Benedict (1945). “Race: Science and Politics”, Viking Adult

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

  Ruth Benedict

  Differences, Culture, Humans

• An 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

  Example, Generations, Culture

• 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

  Emotional, Culture, May

  Ruth Benedict (2011). “An Anthropologist at Work”, p.441, Transaction Publishers

• Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the enormous malleability of their original endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born. It does not matter whether, with the Northwest Coast, it requires delusions of self-reference, or with our own civilization the amassing of possessions. In any case the great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them.

  Ruth Benedict

  Self, Civilization, People

  Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.279, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.

  Ruth Benedict

  Civilization, Society, Analysis

  Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.278, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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.

  Ruth Benedict

  Enlightenment, Needs, Culture

  Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The psychological consequences of this spread of white culture have been out of all proportion to the materialistic. This world-wide cultural diffusion has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples; it has given to our culture a massive universality that we have long ceased to account for historically, and which we read off rather as necessary and inevitable.

  Ruth Benedict

  Men, Civilization, White

• The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.

  Ruth Benedict

  Community, Culture, Shapes

  Patterns of Culture ch. 1 (1934)

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

  Ruth Benedict

  Culture, Intolerance, Anglo Saxon

  Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.36, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• ... with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding of that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger--and it would be fatal to world peace--is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.

  Ruth Benedict

  Country, Fall, Ignorance

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