John Charles Polanyi
  • Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.

  • 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.

  • Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.

  • 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.

  • For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.