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

John Charles Polanyi

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John Charles Polanyi
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More quotes by John Charles Polanyi

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I knew, however, that it would cost ten times what I had available in order to build a molecular beam machine. I decided to follow a byway, rather than the highway. It is a procedure I have subsequently recommended to beginning scientists in this country, where research strategy is best modelled on that used by Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham.
John Charles Polanyi
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Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.
John Charles Polanyi
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For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.
John Charles Polanyi
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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
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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
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Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.
John Charles Polanyi
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Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.
John Charles Polanyi
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It takes a trained and discerning researcher to keep the goal in sight, and to detect evidence of the creeping progress toward it.
John Charles Polanyi
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A wise man in China asked his gardener to plant a shrub. The gardener objected that it only flowered once in a hundred years. In that case, said the wise man, plant it immediately. [On the importance of fundamental research.]
John Charles Polanyi
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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
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Science exists, moreover, only as a journey toward troth. Stifle dissent and you end that journey.
John Charles Polanyi
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If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience.
John Charles Polanyi
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In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.
John Charles Polanyi
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Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.
John Charles Polanyi
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Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.
John Charles Polanyi
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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
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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
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Science is a collection of stories, linking characters worthy of notice.
John Charles Polanyi
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When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves. Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.
John Charles Polanyi
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[Intellectual courage is] the quality that allows one to believe in one's judgement in the face of disappointment and widespread skepticism. Intellectual courage is even rarer than physical courage.
John Charles Polanyi