Francis Crick quotes - page 3

Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children. (Francis Crick)
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist. View quote
Francis Crick
Chance is the only source of true novelty. View quote
Francis Crick
When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery. View quote
Francis Crick
Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice. View quote
Francis Crick
In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death. View quote
Francis Crick
A busy life is a wasted life. View quote
Francis Crick
If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong. View quote
Francis Crick
There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper. View quote
Francis Crick
A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do. View quote
Francis Crick
What could be more foolish than to base one's entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs? (Francis Crick)
A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much. View quote
Francis Crick
The major credit I think Jim and I deserve is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. View quote
Francis Crick
It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place. View quote
Francis Crick
One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together. View quote
Francis Crick
To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there. View quote
Francis Crick
God is a hacker, not an engineer. View quote
Francis Crick
Exploratory research is really like working in a fog. You don't know where you're going. You're just groping. Then people learn about it afterwards and think how straightforward it was. View quote
Francis Crick
Again the message to experimentalists is: Be sensible but don't be impressed too much by negative arguments. If at all possible, try it and see what turns up. Theorists almost always dislike this sort of approach. View quote
Francis Crick
In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers. He seemed to have very strong biological intuitions but unfortunately of negative sign. View quote
Francis Crick
I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism. (Francis Crick)
Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs. View quote
Francis Crick
Our ... advantage was that we had evolved unstated but fruitful methods of collaboration ... If either of us suggested a new idea, the other, while taking it seriously, would attempt to demolish it in a candid but non-hostile manner. View quote
Francis Crick
Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action. View quote
Francis Crick
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. View quote
Francis Crick