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.
John Charles Polanyi

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.
John Charles Polanyi

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.
John Charles Polanyi

For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.
John Charles Polanyi

Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.
John Charles Polanyi

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

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

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

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.
John Charles Polanyi

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.
John Charles Polanyi


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

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

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.
John Charles Polanyi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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