John Charles Polanyi

“The respect for human rights, essential if we are to use technology wisely, is not something alien that must be grafted onto science. On the contrary, it is integral to science, as also to scholarship in general.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Young people ask me if this country is serious about science. They aren't thinking about the passport that they will hold, but the country that they must rely on for support and encouragement.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Others think it the responsibility of scientists to coerce the rest of society, because they have the power that derives from special knowledge.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“A new sense of shared international responsibility is unmistakable in the voices of the United Nations and its agencies, and in the civil society of thousands of supra-national NGOs.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Science exists, moreover, only as a journey toward troth. Stifle dissent and you end that journey.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.”

— John Charles Polanyi

“Though neglectful of their responsibility to protect science, scientists are increasingly aware of their responsibility to society.”

— John Charles Polanyi