John Charles Polanyi Quotes

It is folly to use as one's guide in the selection of fundamental science the criterion of utility. Not because (scientists) ... despise utility. But because.. useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries, rather than before.

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.

The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.

Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.

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.

I knew, however, that it would cost ten times what I had available in order to build a molecular beam machine. I decided to follow a byway, rather than the highway. It is a procedure I have subsequently recommended to beginning scientists in this country, where research strategy is best modelled on that used by Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

At the heart of science lies discovery which involves a change in worldview. Discovery in science is possible only in societies which accord their citizens the freedom to pursue the truth where it may lead and which therefore have respect for different paths to that truth.

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

A wise man in China asked his gardener to plant a shrub. The gardener objected that it only flowered once in a hundred years. "In that case," said the wise man, "plant it immediately." [On the importance of fundamental research.]

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

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

[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.

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.

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

Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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