Author details
All John Charles Polanyi Quotes
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
50% of people like this quote
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
50% of people like this quote
It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience.
John Charles Polanyi
50% of people like this quote
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
50% of people like this quote
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
49% of people like this quote
If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience.
John Charles Polanyi
49% of people like this quote
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
49% of people like this quote
Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it.
John Charles Polanyi
48% of people like this quote
Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.
John Charles Polanyi
48% of people like this quote
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
47% of people like this quote
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.
John Charles Polanyi
46% of people like this quote
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 Charles Polanyi
45% of people like this quote
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
42% of people like this quote
When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves.
John Charles Polanyi
42% of people like this quote
Related authors