James D. Watson Quotes

For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better.

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

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

No good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong.

People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.

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

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.

DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.

If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn't have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday. On the other hand, I was lonely a lot of the time.

Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration

If scientists don't play God, who will?

If you succeed with your first dream, it helps. You know, people trust you, possibly, for the second one. They give you a chance to play out your second one.

I am thrilled to see my genome.

The American public is being sold a very nasty bill of goods about cancer.

I'm basically a libertarian. I don't want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it's going to harm me. I don't want [to] pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It's just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and our brains are so different, we're going to have different aspirations.

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.

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?

Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.

I wish there would be more movies about scientists.

Racists have often used pseudoscience to justify their socially damaging views; watch these films to see how science, by replacing ignorance with knowledge, can undo that damage.

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

Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

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

Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.

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.

There are many people of color who are very talented.

I wanted to see if I could write a good book.

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.

Ultimately, we'll help the people we discriminate against if we try to understand more about them; genetics will lead to a world where there is a sympathy for the underdog.

You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.

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

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.

At lunch Francis [Crick] winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.

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

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

Our goal should be to understand our differences.

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.

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

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

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

The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.

Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.

The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.

I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there! There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn't have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don't bother.

I don't think we are here for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating a good lunch.

If we don't play God, who will?

[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.

As an educator, I have always striven to see that the fruits of the American Dream are available to all.