John Charles Polanyi

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

“For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.”

“Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”