Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton

American Anthropologist, Cultural Relativist and Folklorist

"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... There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand that this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible."

"The highest endowments do not create - they only discover. All transcendent genius has the power to make us know this as utter truth. Shakespeare, Bethoveen - it is inconceivable that they have fashioned the works of their lives; they only saw and heard the universe that is opaque and dumb to us."

"There has never been a time when civilization stood more in need of individuals who are genuinely culture conscious, who can see objectively the social behaviors of other peoples without fear and recrimination."

"War in our own civilization is as good an illustration as one can take of the destructive lengths to which the development of a culturally selected trait may go. 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."

"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."

"The happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and deeply felt good."

"No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking."

"Racism in its nationalist phase... has been a politicians plaything... It is a dangerous plaything, a sword which can be turned in any direction to condemn the enemy of the moment."

"A man's indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude."

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

"Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex."

"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."

"I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women. They have made of their lives a great adventure."

"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."

"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."

"In a world that holds books and babies and canyon trails, why should one condemn oneself to live day-in, day-out with people one does not like, and sell oneself to chaperone and correct them?"

"Little by little, in the long run, aspirations can realize themselves. Work for that. We must count it our wealth."

"I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world."

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

"I have always used the world of make-believe with a certain desperation."

"I haven't strength of mind not to need a career."

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

"Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make."

"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."

"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."

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

"The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer; it's that there are so many answers."

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

"We do not see the lens through which we look."

"We grow in time to trust the future for our answers."

"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."

"Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known."

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

"Work even when I'm satisfied with it is never my child I love nor my servant I've brought to heel. It's always busy work I do with my left hand, and part of me watches grudging the wastes of a lifetime."