Science & Tech Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Polanyi’s line is a scientist’s refusal to let the lab coat double as a moral alibi. He’s not attacking science as a method; he’s attacking the comforting myth that scientific progress automatically drags society toward decency. The opening word, "Instead", does a lot of work: it implies a betrayed expectation, the idea that the twentieth century promised enlightenment and delivered something closer to an upgraded toolkit for cruelty.

The key move is his pairing of "science and its offspring technology". Science is framed as generative, even parental, but the metaphor curdles fast: what’s born can be weaponized. By calling them "brutal instruments", Polanyi strips away the neutral, antiseptic language that often surrounds innovation. Instruments are things you pick up and use; brutality isn’t accidental. That places responsibility squarely on institutions and states, not on abstract "progress."

The subtext is a warning aimed at his own community. Scientists like to imagine themselves as apolitical, but Polanyi suggests that in a world where human rights are optional, neutrality becomes collaboration-by-default. The phrase "absence of respect for human rights" is tellingly broad: he’s not litigating one regime or one ideology so much as diagnosing a condition under which any regime can turn expertise into control.

Contextually, coming from a Nobel-winning chemist shaped by the twentieth century’s dark showcases of applied science - industrialized warfare, surveillance, eugenics, nuclear terror - the sentence reads as both indictment and memo. If rights don’t anchor the project, the most elegant discoveries will still cash out as domination, just faster and at scale.