Ruth Benedict
Ruth Benedict
Ruth Fulton Benedictwas an American anthropologist and folklorist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth5 June 1887
CountryUnited States of America
Ruth Benedict quotes about
civilization society culture
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.
community culture shapes
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.
differences culture humans
The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.
culture intolerance anglo-saxon
Traditional Anglo-Saxon intolerance is a local and temporal culture trait like any other.
example generations culture
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.
culture complexes
Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex
emotional may 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.
happiness happy trouble
The trouble is not that we are never happy - it is that happiness is so episodical
civilization historical groups
Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known.
brave degrees loyal
The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways.
children hands watches
. . . 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.
expression justification feels
It is my necessary breath of life to understand and expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding.
long different rebel
It is strange how long we rebel against a platitude until suddenly in a different lingo it looms up again as the only verity.
self civilization people
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.