Words matter. These are the best John Polanyi Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Under this scientific and moral pressure, the Canadian government conceded publicly that the use of these weapons in Vietnam was, in their view, a contravention of the Geneva Protocol.
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.
It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people’s experience.
Others think it the responsibility of scientists to coerce the rest of society, because they have the power that derives from special knowledge.
In the late 1950s a major topic under discussion was whether Canada should acquire nuclear weapons.
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.
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.
Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.
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.
For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.
The eye searches for shapes. It searches for a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it.
When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves.
Science exists, moreover, only as a journey toward troth. Stifle dissent and you end that journey.
The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.
In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.
Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.
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.
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.
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.
