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"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."
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"Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know."
"Human psychology is the most mysterious thing in the world."
"The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes--most of which took place before humans, before mammals, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence."
"The electrical, electronics and wireless radio frequency (RF) industries are creating an increasingly high radiation environment for the human. This is comparable to the elevated radiation environment found at high altitudes and smart health researchers would be wise to contrast high altitude diseases to the epidemics of our time, such as Autism, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), Fibromyalgia, Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS), and so on."
"Some say we are not like humans but we are more like them than we are different. Man and animals are in the same species as mammals as they have mammary glands that produce the milk to nurse their young. Their lungs breathe air and their blood is warm. They are vertebrates in that their skeletal system and well-designed spines hold their bodies together. Each cell is made of molecules, each molecule is made of atoms, and each atom is made of protons, neutrons and mostly electrons, which are made of waves of fibered light."
"Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.-Why then do you try to 'enlarge' your mind? Subtilize it."
"Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive."
"I would expect a significant development and elaboration of language in only a few generations if all the chimps unable to communicate were to die or fail to reproduce. Basic English corresponds to about 1,000 words. Chimpanzees are already accomplished in vocabularies exceeding 10 percent of that number."
Explore more quotes by John Charles Polanyi
"It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience."
"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 scholarship - if it is to be scholarship - requires, in addition to liberty, that the truth take precedence over all sectarian interests, including self-interest."
"The applause is a celebration not only of the actors but also of the audience. It constitutes a shared moment of delight."
"Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things."
"Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights."
"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."
"Others think it the responsibility of scientists to coerce the rest of society, because they have the power that derives from special knowledge."
"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."
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