On Culture (1960-1969)

"A world view is not merely a philosophical by-product of each culture, like a shadow, but the very skeleton of concrete cognitive assumptions on which the flesh of customary behavior is hung. World view, accordingly, may be expressed, more or less systematically in cosmology, philosophy, ethics, religious ritual, scientific belief, and so on, but it is implicit in almost every act. In Parsonian terms, it constitutes the set of cognitive orientations of the members of a society." (Anthony F C Wallace, "Culture and Personality", 1961)

"Rigorous proofs are the hallmark of mathematics, they are an essential part of mathematics’ contribution to general culture." (George Pólya, "Mathematical Discovery", 1962)

"When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", 1962)

"Science contributes to our culture in many ways, as a creative intellectual activity in its own right, as the light which has served to illuminate man’s place in the universe, and as the source of understanding of man’s own nature." (John F Kennedy, Address to the National Academy of Sciences Washington, D.C., 1963)

"Any culture is a series of related structures which comprise social forms, values, cosmology, the whole of knowledge and through which all experience is mediated." (Mary Douglas, "Purity and Danger", 1966)

"Culture, in the sense of the public, standardised values of a community, mediates the experience of individuals. It provides in advance some basic categories, a positive pattern in which ideas and values are tidily ordered. And above all, it has authority, since each is induced to assent because of the assent of others." (Mary Douglas, "Purity and Danger", 1966)

"Human action is ‘cultural’ in that meanings and intentions concerning acts are formed in terms of symbolic systems (including the codes through which they operate in patterns) that focus most generally about the universal of human societies, language." (Talcott Parsons, "Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives" 1966)

"After all, Greek thought is expressed not only mythically, in fiction, but also directly, in theorems. The gate through which the Greek world may be discussed - and without the knowledge of which, in my opinion, one’s culture can not be deemed complete - is not necessarily Homer. Greek geometry is a wider gate, through which the eye might grasp an austere, yet essential landscape." (Dan Barbilian, 1967)

"Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media works as environments." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of effects", 1967)

"There isn’t a scientific community. It is a culture. It is a very undisciplined organization." (Isidor Isaac Rabi, "The Politics of Pure Science", 1967)

"No science of any kind can be divorced from ethical considerations [...] Science is a human learning process which arises in certain subcultures in human society and not in others, and a subculture as we seen is a group of people defined by acceptance of certain common values, that is, an ethic which permits extensive communication between them." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Economics As A Moral Science", 1969)