John Charles Polanyi Quotes

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

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

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

For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.

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.

Even in the world of molecules the civilising influence of modest restraints is a cause for rejoicing.

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

Science is an enterprise that can only flourish if it puts the truth ahead of nationality, ethnicity, class and color.

Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

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

Discoveries that are anticipated are seldom the most valuable. ... It's the scientist free to pilot his vessel across hidden shoals into open seas who gives the best value.

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.

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

It takes a trained and discerning researcher to keep the goal in sight, and to detect evidence of the creeping progress toward it.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.

Idealism is the highest form of reason.

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.

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

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

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

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

Science is a collection of stories, linking characters worthy of notice.

When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves. Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

[Intellectual courage is] the quality that allows one to believe in one's judgement in the face of disappointment and widespread skepticism. Intellectual courage is even rarer than physical courage.

In education the appetite does indeed grow with eating. I have never known anyone to abandon study because they knew too much.

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.

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.