Quotes from John Charles Polanyi

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.

For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.

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.

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

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.

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.

The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.

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.

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

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

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.