Quotes from John Charles Polanyi


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


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.


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.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.


Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.


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


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


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