Top 76 Polanyi Quotes
#2. 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.
John Charles Polanyi
#4. 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
#6. 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
#7. So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language.
Michael Polanyi
#8. At the heart of science lies discovery which involves a change in worldview. Discovery in science is possible only in societies which accord their citizens the freedom to pursue the truth where it may lead and which therefore have respect for different paths to that truth.
John Charles Polanyi
#9. 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
#10. A free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.
Michael Polanyi
#11. Discoveries are made by pursuing possibilities suggested by existing knowledge.
Michael Polanyi
#13. Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.
John Charles Polanyi
#14. While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable.
Michael Polanyi
#15. My title is intended to suggest that the community of scientists is organized in a way which resembles certain features of a body politic and works according to economic principles similar to those by which the production of material goods is regulated.
Michael Polanyi
#16. In education the appetite does indeed grow with eating. I have never known anyone to abandon study because they knew too much.
John Charles Polanyi
#17. Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.
John Charles Polanyi
#18. [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
#19. 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.
John Charles Polanyi
#20. In the late 1950s a major topic under discussion was whether Canada should acquire nuclear weapons.
John Charles Polanyi
#21. 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
#22. Discoveries that are anticipated are seldom the most valuable ... It's the scientist free to pilot his vessel across hidden shoals into open seas who gives the best value.
John Charles Polanyi
#23. Christianity sedulously fosters, and in a sense permanently satisfies, man's craving for mental dissatisfaction by offering him the comfort of a crucified God.
Michael Polanyi
#24. To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment ... would result in the demolition of society.
Karl Polanyi
#25. Science exists, moreover, only as a journey toward troth. Stifle dissent and you end that journey.
John Charles Polanyi
#26. The eye searches for shapes. It searches for a beginning, a middle, and an end.
John Charles Polanyi
#27. These maxims and the art of interpreting them may be said to constitute the premisses of science but I prefer to call them our scientific beliefs. These premisses or beliefs are embodied in a tradition, the tradition of science.
Michael Polanyi
#28. But the system of prices ruling the market not only transmits information in the light of which economic agents can mutually adjust their actions, it also provides them with an incentive to exercise economy in terms of money.
Michael Polanyi
#29. Science is an enterprise that can only flourish if it puts the truth ahead of nationality, ethnicity, class and color.
John C. Polanyi
#30. The time has come to underscore the fact that our and others' rights are contingent on our willingness to assert and defend them.
John Charles Polanyi
#32. The information in DNA could no more be reduced to the chemical than could the ideas in a book be reduced to the ink and paper: something beyond physics and chemistry encoded DNA.
Michael Polanyi
#33. Poverty was nature surviving in society; that the limitedness of food and the unlimitedness of men had come to an issue just when the promise of boundless increase of wealth burst in upon us made the irony only the more bitter.
Karl Polanyi
#34. If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience. Reality is no less precious if it presents itself to someone else. All are discoverers, and if we disenfranchise any, all suffer.
John Polanyi
#35. Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good. That is impossible. Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.
John Polanyi
#36. Admittedly, scientific authority is not distributed evenly throughout the body of scientists; some distinguished members of the profession predominate over others of a more junior standing.
Michael Polanyi
#37. It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience.
John Charles Polanyi
#38. No inanimate object is ever fully determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.
Michael Polanyi
#39. But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography.
Michael Polanyi
#40. 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
#41. Human beings exercise responsibilities within a social setting and a framework of obligations which transcend the principle of intelligence.
Michael Polanyi
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.
Michael Polanyi
#45. 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
#47. Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority.
John Charles Polanyi
#48. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Of course language manifests a belief only if we use its words with the implied acceptance of their appositeness.
Michael Polanyi
#54. Enclosures have been appropriately called a revolution of the rich against the poor.
Karl Polanyi
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. The first thing to make clear is that scientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating as members of a closely knit organization.
Michael Polanyi
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. the selfish gladly consoled themselves with the thought that though it was merciful at least it was not liberal;
Karl Polanyi
#61. We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography.
Michael Polanyi
#62. Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence.
Michael Polanyi
#64. Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.
John C. Polanyi
#65. Though neglectful of their responsibility to protect science, scientists are increasingly aware of their responsibility to society.
John Polanyi
#66. It is folly to use as one's guide in the selection of fundamental science the criterion of utility. Not because (scientists) ... despise utility. But because.. useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries, rather than before.
John Charles Polanyi
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts.
John Charles Polanyi
#70. Even in the world of molecules the civilising influence of modest restraints is a cause for rejoicing.
John Charles Polanyi
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Personal participation is the universal principle of knowing.
Michael Polanyi
#74. 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
#75. 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
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