John Polanyi Quotes

• Others think it the responsibility of scientists to coerce the rest of society, because they have the power that derives from special knowledge.

  John Polanyi

• It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people’s experience.

  John 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.

  John Polanyi

• 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 Polanyi

• In the late 1950s a major topic under discussion was whether Canada should acquire nuclear weapons.

  John Polanyi

• In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.

  John Polanyi

• If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people’s experience.

  John Polanyi

• Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

  John Polanyi

• For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.

  John Polanyi

• 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 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.

  John 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.

  John Polanyi

John Polanyi (32)

Birth:	23rd January, 1929
Nationality:	Canadian
Profession:	Chemist

About

John Charles Polanyi was born in Berlin, Germany. He is a Canadian chemist. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in chemical kinetics. He shared the prize with Dudley Herschbach of Harvard University and Yuan T. Lee of the University of California. He has received numerous other awards, including Henry Marshall Tory Medal, Wolf Prize in Chemistry, Royal Medal, and Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. He earned a BS degree in Chemistry in 1949 and his PhD in Chemistry in 1952 both from the University of Manchester. From 1954 until 1956, he was a research associate at Princeton University. He started at the University of Toronto as a lecturer in 1956. He moved up the ranks quickly at the university, being promoted to assistant professor in 1957, associate professor in 1960 and becoming a full professor in 1962.

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