Benjamin Franklin Quotes

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment.

Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.

Anthropology studies different cultures; mainly primitive, but it doesn't think its own culture is primitive, unfortunately. There is no field that you can study today that isn't trapped in the culture in some way. It's hard to escape your culture.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in

Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.

Savages!' he echoed, ironically. 'You set foot on one of the shores of this globe, professor, and you’re surprised to find savages? Where aren’t there savages? Besides, are they any worse than others, these whom you call savages?

Our incapacity to comprehend other cultures stems from our insistence on measuring things in our own terms.

Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he less savage than the other savages.

I think an awful lot of the diplomatic problems that exist in the world come from people assuming that their society is the one with a purchase on truth.

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.

I think a lot of the time people assume that their values are universal. And they don't understand which aspects of their values are actually universal and which aspects are very specific.

I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

In Western Europe, Turkey is regarded as uncivilized, so they can't come in into the European Union until they're civilized. I think it's the other way around. If you could achieve the level of civilization of, say, Turkish intelectuals, it would be quite an achievement.

People who put Europe in the center of the universe, they're very fragile.

The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.

The ignorant are afraid to betray surprise or admiration...they think it ill manners.

I think fundamentalism is this radical attitude toward one's own identity and civilization as compared to other people's identities and cultures.

Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.