On Culture (-1949)

"It is the destiny of our race to become united into one great body, thoroughly connected in all its parts, and possessed of similar culture. Nature, and even the passions and vices of Man, have from the beginning tended towards this end. A great part of the way towards it is already passed, and we may surely calculate that it will in time be reached." (Johann G Fichte, "The Vocation of Man", 1800)

"The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts." (Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man", 1871)

"The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption - in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch." (Friedrich Nietzsche," On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense", 1873)

"The culture of the geometric imagination, tending to produce precision in remembrance and invention of visible forms will, therefore, tend directly to increase the appreciation of works of belles-letters." (Thomas Hill, "Uses of Mathesis", Bibliotheca Sacra Vol. 32, 1875)

"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language." (Anton Chekhov, [letter to A.S. Suvorin] 1892) 

"Our science, in contrast with others, is not founded on a single period of human history, but has accompanied the development of culture through all its stages. Mathematics is as much interwoven with Greek culture as with the most modern problems in Engineering. She not only lends a hand to the progressive natural sciences but participates at the same time in the abstract investigations of logicians and philosophers." (Felix Klein, "Klein und Riecke: Ueber angewandte Mathematik und Physik" 1900)

"It is true that mathematics, owing to the fact that its whole content is built up by means of purely logical deduction from a small number of universally comprehended principles, has not unfittingly been designated as the science of the self-evident. Experience however, shows that for the majority of the cultured, even of scientists, mathematics remains the science of the incomprehensible." (Alfred Pringsheim, "Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker Vereinigung Ueber Wert and angeblichen Unwert der Mathematik", 1904)

"The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures." (Max Planck, "Acht Vorlesungen", 1910)

"Only in a free society is man able to create the inventions and cultural values which make life worthwhile to modern man." (Albert Einstein, "Science and Civilization", [speech] 1933)

"Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might." (Johan Huizinga, "In the Shadow of Tomorrow", 1936)

"I see the tasks of social sciences to discover what kinds of order actually do exist in the whole range of the behavior of human beings; what kind of functional relationships between different parts of culture exist in space and over time, and what functionally more useful kinds of order can be created." (Robert S Lynd, "Knowledge of What?", 1939)

"[...] science, if given its head, is not just cold efficiency; its attitude is tolerant, friendly and humane. It has already become the dominant inspiration of human culture, so that modern poetry, painting and architecture derive their most constructive ideas from scientific thought." (Conrad H Waddington, "The Scientific Attitude", 1941)

"Science can give us only the tools in the box, these mechanical miracles that it has already given us. But of what use to us are miraculous tools until we have mastered the humane, cultural use of them? We do not want to live in a world where the machine has mastered the man; we want to live in a world where man has mastered the machine." (Frank L Wright, "Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings 1894-1940", 1941)

"A culture is an historically created system of explicit and implicit designs for living, which tends to be shared by all or specially designated members of a group at a specified point in time." (Clyde Kluckhohn & W H Kelley, "The Concept of Culture", 1945)

"[...] science is truly one of the highest expressions of human culture - dignified and intellectually honest, and withal a never-ending adventure. Personally, I feel much the same with regard to the more ecstatic moments in science as I do with regard to music. I see little difference between the thrill of scientific discovery and what one experiences when listening to the opening bars of the Ninth Symphony." (William T Astbury, "Science in Relation to the Community", School Science Review Nr. 109, 1948)