M Polanyi Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Moreover, only a strong and united scientific opinion imposing the intrinsic value of scientific progress on society at large can elicit the support of scientific inquiry by the general public.

Michael Polanyi

#3. I shall suggest, on the contrary, that all communication relies, to a noticeable extent on evoking knowledge that we cannot tell, and that all our knowledge of mental processes, like feelings or conscious intellectual activities, is based on a knowledge which we cannot tell.

Michael Polanyi

#4. the organization of labor is only another word for the forms of life of the common people, this means that the development of the market system would be accompanied by a change in the organization of society itself. All along the line, human society had become an accessory of the economic system.

Karl Polanyi

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

John Charles Polanyi

#6. Even in the world of molecules the civilising influence of modest restraints is a cause for rejoicing.

John Charles Polanyi

#7. 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

#8. Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment.

Michael Polanyi

#9. Personal participation is the universal principle of knowing.

Michael Polanyi

#10. Admittedly, the body of scientists, as a whole, does uphold the authority of science over the lay public. It controls thereby also the process by which young men are trained to become members of the scientific profession.

Michael Polanyi

#11. And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry.

Michael Polanyi

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

John Charles Polanyi

#13. The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.

John Charles Polanyi

#14. I hold that the propositions embodied in natural science are not derived by any definite rule from the data of experience, and that they can neither be verified nor falsified by experience according to any definite rule.

Michael Polanyi

#15. Human beings exercise responsibilities within a social setting and a framework of obligations which transcend the principle of intelligence.

Michael Polanyi

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.

Michael Polanyi

#19. 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

#20. Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

John Charles Polanyi

#21. Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority.

John Charles Polanyi

#22. Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.

Karl Polanyi

#23. But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography.

Michael Polanyi

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. Of course language manifests a belief only if we use its words with the implied acceptance of their appositeness.

Michael Polanyi

#28. Enclosures have been appropriately called a revolution of the rich against the poor.

Karl Polanyi

#29. 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.

John Charles Polanyi

#30. 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