“Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to a new thought.
Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.”

Address delivered to the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression awards banquet, in The Globe and Mail (27 November 2004) http://www.cjfe.org/awards06/speaker_polanyi.html.

A Call to Greatness (1954), p. 99

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

On leadership and the relation between madness, heresy, and genius.
Ideas as Art (2006)

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: When the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma—a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatization in science, religion, social life, or art is the entropy of thought. What has become dogma no longer burns; it only gives off warmth — it is tepid, it is cool. Instead of the Sermon on the Mount, under the scorching sun, to up-raised arms and sobbing people, there is drowsy prayer in a magnificent abbey. Instead of Galileo's "But still, it turns!" there are dispassionate computations in a well-heated room in an observatory. On the Galileos, the epigones build their own structures, slowly, bit by bit, like corals. This is the path of evolution — until a new heresy explodes the crush of dogma and all the edifices of the most enduring stone which have been raised upon it.
Explosions are not very comfortable. And therefore the exploders, the heretics, are justly exterminated by fire, by axes, by words. To every today, to every evolution, to the laborious, slow, useful, most useful, creative, coral-building work, heretics are a threat. Stupidly, recklessly, they burst into today from tomorrow; they are romantics.

A Man From Lebanon: Nineteen Centuries Afterward
Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
Context: Here and there, betwixt the cradle and the coffin, I meet your silent brothers,
The free men, unshackled,
Sons of your mother earth and space.
They are like the birds of the sky,
And like the lilies of the field.
They live your life and think your thoughts,
And they echo your song.
But they are empty-handed,
And they are not crucified with the great crucifixion,
And therein is their pain.
The world crucifies them every day,
But only in little ways.
The sky is not shaken,
And the earth travails not with her dead.

The Latin phrase "The victorious cause pleased the gods" is from Lucan.
Source: "The Prophetic Tradition" (1982), p. 368

Darwiniana: the Origin of Species (1860) http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8thdr10.txt
1860s
Context: It is true that if philosophers have suffered their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science...

As quoted in Œuvres complètes de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Volume 7 (1828) by Louis Aimé-Martin, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Aug. Wahlen. p. 47
Original: la charité de l'Evangile doit s'étendre à toutes les religions et l'hospitalité française à tous les peuples.