Ruth Benedict Quotes

I should be so lucky to be a misfit. I aspire to be a misfit.

It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.

Things appear different from every different plane from which you look at them, and when a person standing on flat earth asks a person standing on top of a mountain, "Do you also believe something?" the person cannot tell much. The questioner must come to the top of the mountain and see. There can be no link of conversation between them until that time.

France is ready for a European revolution and it is Germany that is pulling the brakes. For a long time, it was the other way around. You don't have to agree with the details of every single one of Emmanuel Macron's suggestions, but he's right about the idea of a new foundation of Europe. Europe's Social Democrats have long demanded this. If we really want to, we can create a different, better Europe in the coming years.

Egyptians are like camels: they can put up with beatings, humiliation and starvation for a long time but when they rebel they do so suddenly and with a force that is impossible to control.

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you'd forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularily life with other people, possible.

Most of us have one big idea at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance of serendipity.

I've never really had any barrier to break I guess. I don't really have anything to rebel against. I'm quite lucky.

How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world

Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

I always wanted to rebel.

Don't be upset that it takes a long, long time to find wisdom because nobody knows where wisdom can be found. It tends to break out at unexpected times like a rare virus and mostly people with compassion and understanding are susceptible to it.

Reaction is what changes your understanding of the world.

Many a truth is the result of an error.

I really wasn't very much of a rebel. I'm seen by people now as more of a rebel which is strange. I don't like doing what people tell me to do. I don't deliberately rebel against them.

We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms.

It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.

I'm not looking for images, They just appear and take on an interest. Sometimes you look at a thing and it has no interest and then you see it in a different way and it has another meaning. Or something that was of no use will become useful.

The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy-the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops

We must remember, elections are short-term efforts. Revolutions are long-term projects.

Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.

Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.

George Bush asked me if there was anything he could do for me, and I said, "Yes, you can help promote peace in Sudan after eight years of different policy." And he said, "I'll do it." So to make a long story short, he did it, not necessarily because I requested it, but they were very successful.

doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time

Everyone has that moment where they just rebel.