Ruth Benedict Quotes

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

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

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.

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?

Faith is the sturdiest the most manly of the virtues. It lies behind our pluckiest... strivings. It is the virtue of the storm just as happiness is the virtue of the sunshine.

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

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.