John Charles Polanyi is a Canadian scientist known for his contributions to chemical physics. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 for his work on the dynamics of chemical reactions. Polanyi's research has significantly advanced the understanding of reaction mechanisms and his innovative approaches have influenced the fields of chemistry and molecular science.

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



"Though neglectful of their responsibility to protect science, scientists are increasingly aware of their responsibility to society."



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



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



"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."



"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."



"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."



"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."



"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."



"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."



"Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority."



"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."



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



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



"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."

