Ruth Benedict Quotes

Because we're brought into the world or educated in a certain way, we're trained to accept the world in a certain way.

We were raised to believe that our way of seeing the world was the only way.

People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.

No work of history can ever escape its own time...we are all influenced by what we read and what we experience.

The same evidence that is convincing to one person may not convince another.

Do not engage to find things as you think they are.

Truth" is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.

I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.

Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.

There's no way to remove the observer - us - from our perceptions of the world.

We all have mental models: the lens through which we see the world that drive our responses to everything we experience. Being aware of your mental models is key to being objective.

We all live with blinders on. They come with having a personal vantage point.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.

To know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations.

What a man sees depends on what he looks at and what his previous experience has taught him to see.

Prejudice locks the mind. Nothing can enter. Nothing true can escape.

Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.

Remember, we see the world not as it is but as we are. Most of us see through the eyes of our fears and our limiting beliefs and our false assumptions.

Remember that my view, the only true view I can see with, is through the black eyes that I have.

I've always been intrigued by why people believe one thing over another.