Crick Quotes

If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong. ~ Francis Crick

Human beings ... are far too prone to generalize from one instance. The technical word for this, interestingly enough, is superstition. ~ Francis Crick

Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus. ~ Francis Crick

For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the - class as having one too few. ~ 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. ~ Francis Crick

A comparison between the triplets tentatively deduced by these methods with the changes in amino acid sequence produced by mutation shows a fair measure of agreement. ~ 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. ~ Francis Crick

A final proof of our ideas can only be obtained by detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here. ~ Francis Crick

There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper. ~ Francis Crick

Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking. ~ Francis Crick

And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God. ~ Salvador Dali

The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order. ~ Bernard Crick

If the code does indeed have some logical foundation then it is legitimate to consider all the evidence, both good and bad, in any attempt to deduce it. ~ Francis Crick

When he unleashes on her everything falls together. Like a crick in the neck snapped into place, the boy's brain pops and is put right. It is a beautiful undoing, a beautiful becoming. He doesn't stop to think about it when the punches follow her down to the ground. He doesn't stop to notice when she goes still or when the pool of blood under her head pillows out into a great, liquid heart. He doesn't stop until he's pulled off her and he doesn't start to think again until that night, when he's back at home. For hours and hours his brain stays beautifully popped into place. ~ Carolyn Lee Adams

Gmorning.
Grateful for growing pains,
Grateful for the lines on my face,
Grateful for the crick in my neck,
Grateful for hot showers,
Grateful for broken coffee machines,
Grateful for the thumbs typing this,
Grateful for another day alive at the same time as you.

Gnight.
Grateful for long days,
Grateful for aches and pains,
Grateful for quick pad thai delivery,
Grateful for hot baths,
Grateful for early work calls tomorrow,
Grateful for the thumbs typing this,
Grateful for another day alive at the same time as you. ~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

If poly A is added to poly U, to form a double or triple helix, the combination is inactive. ~ Francis Crick

God is a hacker, not an engineer ~ Francis Crick

Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself. ~ Francis Crick

Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence ... politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good. ~ Bernard Crick

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ Francis Crick

What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital ... the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins ~ Matt Ridley

A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much. ~ Francis Crick

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. ~ Francis Crick

I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood. Perhaps in other company he is that way, but I have never had reason so to judge him. ~ James D. Watson

Free men stick their necks out. ~ Bernard Crick

Haemoglobin is a very large molecule by ordinary standards, containing about ten thousand atoms, but the chances are that your haemoglobin and mine are identical, and significantly different from that of a pig or horse. You may be impressed by how much human beings differ from one another, but if you were to look into the fine details of the molecules of which they are constructed, you would be astonished by their similarity. ~ Francis Crick

Every morning she'd crick herself down onto the flimsy rug by her bed and pray, but it was actually a promise: Today I won't yell, I won't cry, I won't clench up into a ball like I am waiting for a blow to level me. I will enjoy today. She might make it to lunch before she went sour. ~ Gillian Flynn

At lunch Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life. ~ James D. Watson

Dr. Jules Hilbert: Hell Harold, you could just eat nothing but pancakes if you wanted.
Harold Crick: What is wrong with you? Hey, I don't want to eat nothing but pancakes, I want to live! I mean, who in their right mind in a choice between pancakes and living chooses pancakes?
Dr. Jules Hilbert: Harold, if you pause to think, you'd realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led ... and, of course, the quality of the pancakes. ~ Zach Helm

Monarchy is like a splendid ship, with all sails set it moves majestically on, but then it hits a rock and sinks for ever. Democracy is like a raft. It never sinks but, damn it, your feet are always in the water. That is a good metaphor, for raft, he implies, is simply swept along by the tide or the current; one can with a paddle or a plank steer a little to stay afloat, trim forward direction slightly to left or right, perhaps even slow down or speed up a little, but there is no turning back against the current of democracy. ~ Bernard Crick

While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research. ~ Francis Crick

It now seems certain that the amino acid sequence of any protein is determined by the sequence of bases in some region of a particular nucleic acid molecule. ~ Francis Crick

Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one. ~ Bernard Crick

Revolutions as often take place because the old regime simply collapse out of economic inefficiency and bureaucratic rigidity rather than for the reasons given out by their successors taking too much credit, however heroic their actions at the time of crisis (but so often in the past hopeless). ~ Bernard Crick

We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind. ~ Francis Crick

There is no great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price. ~ Bernard Crick

All approaches at a higher level are suspect until confirmed at the molecular level. ~ Francis Crick

Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs. ~ Bernard Crick

How do I know what I think until I hear what I say? ~ Francis Crick

Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking. ~ Bernard Crick

Politics is too often regarded as a poor relation, inherently dependent and subsidiary; it is rarely praised as something with a life and character of its own. ~ Bernard Crick

You can do reverse engineering, but you can't do reverse hacking. ~ Francis Crick

If a government is to do great new things, it will need more support. If a government is to change the world, it will need mass support. This is one of the discoveries of modern government. ~ Bernard Crick

BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men. ~ Bernard Crick

It was the same smile he used in bed with Crick
the gentle, sweet smile that made him look young and a little vulnerable. Crick turned the picture around, and Benny had written, I asked him to think of you. ~ Amy Lane

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. ~ Francis Crick

A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong ~ Francis Crick

Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage. ~ Bernard 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. ~ Francis Crick

It has yet to be shown by direct biochemical methods, as opposed to the indirect genetic evidence mentioned earlier, that the code is indeed a triplet code. ~ Francis Crick

So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn't touch. This gave them a sort of twisted ladder - the famed double helix. ~ Sam Kean

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. ~ Francis Crick

Okay," Crick said, rolling his eyes. "I give. Which part of my body is more interesting than my ass?"
Deacon rewarded his obtuseness with a smack to the head. "Your heart, you fuckin' moron ... ~ Amy Lane

He reached a large stream, of the kind the locals called a creek and pronounced crick, and decided to follow it. ~ Neil Gaiman

Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice. ~ Francis Crick

It is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot. ~ Francis Crick

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy. ~ Francis Crick

If you want to understand function, study structure, ~ Francis Crick

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues. ~ Richard Dawkins

Good things don't always lead to bad ones, Crick. ~ Deb Caletti

One of the symptoms of a declining social order is that its members have to give most of their time to politics, rather than to the real tasks of economic production, in an attempt to patch up the cracks already appearing from the 'inner contradictions' of such a system. ~ Bernard Crick

An ex-wife is a woman with a crick in the neck from looking back over her shoulder at her matrimony. ~ Ursula Parrott

We've discovered the secret of life. ~ Francis Crick

This seems highly likely, especially as it has been shown that in several systems mutations affecting the same amino acid are extremely near together on the genetic map. ~ Francis Crick

I fought for seven years to have creche facilities at the Okinawa Institute of Science of Technology - and was ultimately successful. Less successful have been efforts to get a creche at the new Crick Institute in London, but this is something I will continue to push for. ~ Tim Hunt

Consciousness is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high frequency firing of neurons in different parts of the brain. It's the meshing of these frequencies that generates consciousness, just as tones from individual instruments produce the rich, complex, & seamless sounds of a symphony orchestra ~ 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. ~ Francis Crick

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. ~ Francis Crick

Where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge. ~ David Brin

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. ~ Francis Crick

[When asked by a student if he believes in any gods]
Oh, no. Absolutely not ... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand. ~ James D. Watson

Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help. ~ Francis Crick

We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +'s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +'s. ~ Francis Crick

Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives. ~ Bernard Crick

If, for example, all the codons are triplets, then in addition to the correct reading of the message, there are two incorrect readings which we shall obtain if we do not start the grouping into sets of three at the right place. ~ Francis Crick

I think she [Rosalind Franklin] was a good experimentalist but certainly not of the first rank. She was simply not in the same class as Eigen or Bragg or Pauling, nor was she as good as Dorothy Hodgkin. She did not even select DNA to study. It was given to her. Her theoretical crystallography was very average. ~ Francis Crick

He told me that Francis Crick and Jim Watson had solved the structure of DNA, so we decided to go across to Cambridge to see it. This was in April of 1953. ~ Sydney Brenner

I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years. ~ Linus Pauling

The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one. Indeed, it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite, so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts. ~ Sigmund Freud

The politician has no more use for pride than Falstaff had for honour. ~ Bernard Crick

Gundhrold's head lowered until his massive beak was only inches away from Amos's nose. "I am a son of the desert. This was once my home - the home of all my kind. I know every crag, every slope, every crick and hollow-"
Amos rolled his eyes. "Every blatherin' speck o' sand? ~ Gillian Bronte Adams

It now seems very likely that many of the 64 triplets, possibly most of them, may code one amino acid or another, and that in general several distinct triplets may code one amino acid. ~ Francis Crick

I have to concentrate more intently when people speak. I always have to position myself on their right side so that I can hear out of my left ear. I sometimes get a crick in my neck from listening. But I don't there's too much else. ~ Stephanie Beacham

Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets. ~ Francis Crick

Jonathan Sacks; "One way is just to think, for instance, of biodiversity. The extraordinary thing we now know, thanks to Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, is that all life, everything, all the three million species of life and plant life - all have the same source. We all come from a single source. Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet. Unity creates diversity. So don't think of one God, one truth, one way. Think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways, the 6,800 languages that are actually spoken. Don't think there's only one language within which we can speak to God. The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don't think that God is as simple as you are. He's in places you would never expect him to be. And you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. When Moses at the burning bush says to God, "Who are you?" God says to him three words: "Hayah asher hayah."Those words are mistranslated in English as "I am that which I am." But in Hebrew, it means "I will be who or how or where I will be," meaning, Don't think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. One of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God's presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. Don't think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion. ~ Krista Tippett

The political process is not tied to any particular doctrine. Genuine political doctrines, rather, are the attempt to find particular and workable solutions to this perpetual and shifty problem of conciliation. ~ Bernard Crick

It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry - which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks - that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature. ~ Francis Crick

In fact, on one occasion, a rather pedantic experimental psychologist was telling him about a long, complicated experiment he had done, incorporating all the proper controls and using considerable technical virtuosity. When he saw Crick's exasperated expression he said, "but Dr. Crick, we have got it right - we know it's right," Crick's response was, "The point is not whether it's right. The point is: does it even matter whether its right or wrong?" ~ Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

For really it was the refinement of civilized cruelty, this spick, span, and ingenious affair of shining leather and gleaming steel, which hoisted you and tilted you and fitted reassuringly into the small of your back and cupped your head tenderly between padded cushions. It ensured for you a more complete muscular relaxation than any armchair that you could buy for your own home: but it left your tormented nerves without even the solace of a counter-irritant. In the old days the victim's attention had at least been distracted by an ache in the back, a crick in the neck, pins and needles in the legs, and the uneasy tickling of plush under the palm. But now, too efficiently suspended between heaven and earth, you were at liberty to concentrate on hell. ~ Jan Struther

The RCP's belief that capitalism was on the point of collapse started to look somewhat unconvincing. And ~ Michael Crick

In the words of the late Francis Crick ... You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13) ~ Mary Roach

It would appear that the number of nonsense triplets is rather low, since we only occasionally come across them. However this conclusion is less secure than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code. ~ Francis Crick

Moreover the incorporation requires the same components needed for protein synthesis, and is inhibited by the same inhibitors. Thus the system is most unlikely to be a complete artefact and is very probably closely related to genuine protein synthesis. ~ Francis Crick

It is one of the striking generalizations of biochemistry - which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical text-books - that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature. As far as I am aware the presently accepted set of twenty amino acids was first drawn up by Watson and myself in the summer of 1953 in response to a letter of Gamow's. ~ Francis Crick

The plain truth is that what holds a free state together is neither general will nor a common interest, but simply politics itself. ~ Bernard Crick

It doesn't matter if we're young. If you love someone, and it's right ... We can make it the whole way, Crick. ~ Deb Caletti

The attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, than politics has in fact become totalitarian. ~ Bernard Crick

The dude feels right fatherly. Takes her down to the crick to wash the underground off of her. Just can't bring himself to shoot her while she's filthy and starving. There's time. Offers her a cake of French-milled soap he brought all the way out from Chicago. Smells like gardenias if you know your flowers, and the dude does. Snow White knows something's skewed but she grabs it, strips off like it's nothing and climbs in the water. She don't shiver even though that stream has to be as cold as a wagon tire. The miner's crud comes off her in black ribbons. The duded watches another girl come out of the blind mole-skin she was walking around it. This one has muscles like a mountain cat and a kind of pretty he doesn't know what to do with. For fairness he'd take her stepmother six days and twice on Sunday. The beauty Snow White's got has nothing to do with him. She's scarred up and suspicious an shameless. Her pretty's not for him. It's like saying the moon's got a fine figure on her. Maybe true, but what good is that to a man? ~ Catherynne M. Valente

How is the base sequence, divided into codons? There is nothing in the backbone of the nucleic acid, which is perfectly regular, to show us how to group the bases into codons. ~ Francis Crick

My brother then bought 1000 Japanese cameras. They all go, "Crick". ~ Henny Youngman