John Polanyi
John Polanyi

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.

John Polanyi
John 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 Polanyi
John Polanyi

Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it. It is civilizing because it puts truth ahead of all else, including personal interests.

John Polanyi
John Polanyi

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

John Polanyi
John Polanyi

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

John Polanyi
John 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 Polanyi
John Polanyi

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

John Polanyi
John Polanyi

Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

John Polanyi
John Polanyi

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.

John Polanyi
John 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 Polanyi
John 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 Polanyi
John Polanyi

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

John Polanyi
John Polanyi

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

John Polanyi
John Polanyi

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

John Polanyi
John Polanyi

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

John Polanyi
John Polanyi

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

John Polanyi
John 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 Polanyi
John Polanyi

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.

John Polanyi
John Polanyi

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 Polanyi
John Polanyi

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