John Charles Polanyi Quotes (36 Quotes)

In the late 1950s a major topic under discussion was whether Canada should acquire nuclear weapons.

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

The applause is a celebration not only of the actors but also of the audience. It constitutes a shared moment of delight.

For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.

The moral force that we brought to this debate derived from our membership in an international community ruled by law - albeit unwritten law.

The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.

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.

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.

If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience.

The scientific and scholarly community is marked by the belief that the truth is to be found in all; none can claim it as their monopoly.

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

For scholarship - if it is to be scholarship - requires, in addition to liberty, that the truth take precedence over all sectarian interests, including self-interest.

What makes the Universal Declaration an epochal document is first of all its global impetus and secondly the breadth of its claims, a commitment to a new social contract, binding on all the Governments of the world.

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

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

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

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

Reality is no less precious if it presents itself to someone else. All are discoverers, and if we disenfranchise any, all suffer.

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

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.

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

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.

Our assessment of socio-economic worth is largely a sham. We scientists should not lend ourselves to it - though we routinely do. We should, instead, insist on applying the criterion of quality.

In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.

Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority.

Under this scientific and moral pressure, the Canadian government conceded publicly that the use of these weapons in Vietnam was, in their view, a contravention of the Geneva Protocol.

Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.

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

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.

Science, it seemed, held the key to an age of ease and plenty, and for many that proved to be the case. But for still more, it did not.

The eye searches for shapes. It searches for a beginning, a middle, and an end.

That is of course flattering, since facts are incontrovertible. But it is also demeaning, since facts are meaningless. They contain no narrative.

The time has come to underscore the fact that our and others' rights are contingent on our willingness to assert and defend them.

Individual scientists like myself - and many more conspicuous - pointed to the dangers of radioactive fallout over Canada if we were to launch nuclear weapons to intercept incoming bombers.

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