James D. Watson Quotes

Knowing "why" (an idea) is more important than learning "what" (the fact).

The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.

Remember, grab you're future with both hands and mold it into what you want it to be. It's the determined, who create the life they want, while the idle sit by and watch it fade away into nothingness. The future belongs to the exceptional individuals, who can see the light of the future, at the end of the tunnel.

Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.

We're not all equal, it's simply not true. That isn't science.

Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration

Never be the brightest person in the room.

It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.

Our goal should be to understand our differences.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural.

No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural, and it was a lesson that my father passed on to me, that knowledge liberates mankind from superstition. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

If scientists don't play God, who will?

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

A clone of Einstein wouldn't be stupid, but he wouldn't necessarily be any genius, either.

Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them.

There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.

I turned against the left wing because they don't like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.

The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.

The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. 5

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.