Justice & Law Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Rights don’t “exist” in Polanyi’s sentence so much as they keep getting renegotiated under pressure. The phrasing is almost laboratory-clean, but the warning is political: treat rights as self-sustaining and you invite their quiet expiration. “The time has come” is a crisis bell without theatrics, the kind of urgency a scientist might trust more than melodrama. “Underscore the fact” signals frustration with complacency, as if the data are already in and society is still refusing to read the chart.

The sharpest move is the inclusion of “our and others’.” Polanyi collapses the comforting boundary between self-interest and solidarity: defending rights selectively is not only morally thin, it’s strategically stupid. If rights are contingent, then any group allowed to lose them becomes a proof of concept that others can, too. The sentence pushes against the liberal fantasy that institutions, courts, or “norms” will do the defending for us. Contingent on willingness means the real guarantor is civic backbone: public speech, protest, voting, litigation, whistleblowing, professional risk.

Context matters here because Polanyi isn’t a party operative; he’s a Nobel-winning scientist speaking from a tradition that remembers how quickly “rational” societies can normalize censorship, scapegoating, and surveillance. Coming from science, the line also reads as a defense of inquiry itself: academic freedom and democratic rights share a fragile dependency on people who will absorb costs to keep them alive.

The subtext is bracing: rights are not an inheritance you receive. They’re a practice you perform, or you lose them.