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"The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science."
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"Psychology more than any other science has had its pseudo-scientific no less than its scientific period."
"Like all science, psychology is knowledge; and like science again, it is knowledge of a definite thing, the mind."
"While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it."
"It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception."
Explore more quotes by John Charles Polanyi
"In the late 1950s a major topic under discussion was whether Canada should acquire nuclear weapons."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The time has come to underscore the fact that our and others' rights are contingent on our willingness to assert and defend them."
"The applause is a celebration not only of the actors but also of the audience. It constitutes a shared moment of delight."
"Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority."
"It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience."
"Though neglectful of their responsibility to protect science, scientists are increasingly aware of their responsibility to society."
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