3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 John Charles 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.
3 December 2020 John Charles 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.
3 December 2020 John Charles Polanyi Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it.
3 December 2020 John Charles Polanyi Though neglectful of their responsibility to protect science, scientists are increasingly aware of their responsibility to society.
3 December 2020 John Charles Polanyi When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves.
3 December 2020 John Charles Polanyi Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 John Charles Polanyi Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 John Charles Polanyi Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.
3 December 2020 John Charles Polanyi 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.
3 December 2020 John Charles Polanyi It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit it acknowledges the commonality of people’s experience.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 John Charles Polanyi Science exists, moreover, only as a journey toward troth. Stifle dissent and you end that journey.
