James D Watson Quotes

I don't want to die until I see cancer cured. ~ James D. Watson

As a child, I lived with being punier than other boys in class. The only consolation was my parents' empathy - they encouraged constant trips to the local drugstore for chocolate milk shakes to fatten me up. The shakes made me happy, but still, all through grammar school, other kids shoved me around. ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

I would only once have the opportunity to let my scientific career encompass a path from the double helix to the three billion steps of the human genome. ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

I wanted to see if I could write a good book. ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

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

Never be the brightest person in the room. ~ James D. Watson

My parents made it clear that I should never display even the slightest disrespect to individuals who had the power to let me skip a half grade or move into more challenging classes. While it was all right for me to know more about a topic than my sixth-grade teacher had ever learned, questioning her facts could only lead to trouble. ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting. ~ James D. Watson

If you go into science, I think you better go in with a dream that maybe you, too, will get a Nobel Prize. It's not that I went in and I thought I was very bright and I was going to get one, but I'll confess, you know, I knew what it was. ~ James D. Watson

I wish there would be more movies about scientists. ~ James D. Watson

By the age of 11, I was no longer going to Sunday Mass, and going on birdwatching walks with my father. So early on, I heard of Charles Darwin. I guess, you know, he was the big hero. And, you know, you understand life as it now exists through evolution. ~ James D. Watson

Our goal should be to understand our differences. ~ James D. Watson

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

You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient. ~ James D. Watson

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

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced. ~ James D. Watson

DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush. ~ James D. Watson

It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant. ~ James D. Watson

If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true. ~ James D. Watson

I have a son, who is a ... not an ordinary form of schizophrenia, but clearly, cannot take care of himself. And the great fear of then, of all parents is, when the parents die, who takes care of your child? And the answer is: they become homeless. ~ James D. Watson

You move forward through knowledge. You prevail through knowledge. I love the word 'prevail.' Prevail! ~ James D. Watson

Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don't have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution. ~ James D. Watson

Most academic battles involve space or faculty appointments and promotions. ~ James D. Watson

It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths. ~ James D. Watson

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

Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration ~ James D. Watson

I do think one success of Northern Europe, which the United States came from, was its willingness to accept innovation in business practices like Adam Smith and the whole Enlightenment. It essentially made the merchant class free instead of controlled by the king and aristocracy. That was essential. ~ James D. Watson

'Genes, Girls, and Gamow' was an attempt, even more than 'The Double Helix,' to mix science with one's personal life. With 'The Double Helix,' no one had done it before, but I thought I'd try. ~ James D. Watson

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

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. ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

If we don't play God, who will? ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly. ~ James D. Watson

It is extraordinary the extent to which Darwin's insights not only changed his contemporaries' view of the world but also continue to be a source of great intellectual stimulation for scientists and nonscientists alike. ~ James D. Watson

Biology has at least 50 more interesting years. ~ James D. Watson

[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

The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. ~ James D. Watson

My wife and I have a schizophrenic son. We didn't want to accept this for 30 years, so we put him under great pressure when we shouldn't have. He just wanted to be looked after, and we didn't respect that. We tried to make him independent. ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work. ~ James D. Watson

Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans favour research using embryonic stem cells and yet politicians continue to pander to the outspoken religious minority that is hampering efforts to develop this potentially valuable technology. ~ James D. Watson

One-third of all female infertility is the result of blocked fallopian tubes. If fertilization could be done in the lab and then the fertilized egg implanted in the womb, it would get around that problem. Millions of women who cannot have children would suddenly be able to. ~ James D. Watson

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

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

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

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

The American public is being sold a very nasty bill of goods about cancer. ~ James D. Watson

If we could honestly promise young couples that we knew how to give them offspring with superior character, why should we assume they would decline? Common sense tells us that if scientists find ways to greatly improve human capabilities, there will no stopping the public from happily seizing them. ~ James D. Watson

The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast. ~ James D. Watson

Genetically modified foods are good. ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged. ~ James D. Watson

Great wealth could make an enormous difference over the next decade if they sensibly support the scientific elite. Just the elite. Because the elite makes most of the progress. You should worry about people who produce really novel inventions, not pedantic hacks. ~ James D. Watson

(The National Cancer Program is) a bunch of (obscenity). ~ James D. Watson

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

I am thrilled to see my genome. ~ James D. Watson

There are many people of color who are very talented. ~ James D. Watson

People say we are playing God. My answer is: If we don't play God, who will? ~ James D. Watson

Spotting a rare bird is never worth the bite of a cur. Once bitten by a German shepherd, I knew that I preferred cats, even if they are bird-killers. Life is long enough for more than one chance at a rare bird. ~ James D. Watson

[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. ~ James D. Watson

​Briefly, the Indiana biochemists encouraged me to learn organic chemistry, but after I used a bunsen burner to warm up some benzene, I was relieved from further true chemistry. It was safer to turn out an uneducated Ph.D. than to risk another explosion. ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer. ~ James D. Watson

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

I first became aware of Charles Darwin and evolution while still a schoolboy growing up in Chicago. My father and I had a passion for bird-watching, and when the snow or the rain kept me indoors, I read his bird books and learned about evolution. ~ James D. Watson

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. ~ James D. Watson

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

We should govern our actions by assuming that people are more good than bad. Whereas, most of our social policies dictate that people are more bad than good. That you know if you do something, it'll be seized by the rich to exploit the poor. ~ James D. Watson

Good convention, with the military class and the ~ James D. Best

Accordingly, we find Euler and D'Alembert devoting their talent and their patience to the establishment of the laws of rotation of the solid bodies. Lagrange has incorporated his own analysis of the problem with his general treatment of mechanics, and since his time M. Poinsot has brought the subject under the power of a more searching analysis than that of the calculus, in which ideas take the place of symbols, and intelligent propositions supersede equations. ~ James Clerk Maxwell

A long decade ago economic growth was the reigning fashion of political economy. It was simultaneously the hottest subject of economic theory and research, a slogan eagerly claimed by politicians of all stripes, and a serious objective of the policies of governments. The climate of opinion has changed dramatically. Disillusioned critics indict both economic science and economic policy for blind obeisance to aggregate material "progress," and for neglect of its costly side effects. Growth, it is charged, distorts national priorities, worsens the distribution of income, and irreparably damages the environment. Paul Erlich speaks for a multitude when he says, "We must acquire a life style which has as its goal maximum freedom and happiness for the individual, not a maximum Gross National Product." [in Nordhaus, William D. and James Tobin., "Is growth obsolete?" Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect Vol 5: Economic Growth. Nber, 1972. 1-80] ~ James Tobin

It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us. ~ P.D. James

When U.S. prisoners were killed, it was "murder in flagrant disregard of the Geneva Conventions." But when Americans murdered Others, "they had it coming to them. ~ James D. Bradley

There are few activities so agreeable as spending a friend's money to your own satisfaction and his benefit. ~ P.D. James

He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and self-indulgent exploration, a means of makings sense of the past years, part catharsis, part comforting affirmation. ~ P.D. James

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead. ~ P.D. James

Rock and roll has had a powerful anti-Christian subtheme for decades now. ~ D. James Kennedy

A great writer weaves words like a painter mixes colors. ~ James D. Maxon

Crowdsourcing can greatly increase the number of ideas entering the front-end of the innovation funnel, however, using the wrong source can result in a large number of inappropriate ideas, and the lack of defined process for managing the progress of ideas through the funnel can result in the funnel becoming blocked. ~ D. James Kennedy

In Jerusalem there was a lack of the proper atmosphere for Paul to present what he had within him. From a careful reading of Acts 15 we can realize that in Jerusalem there was an atmosphere of superiority. To some extent at least, the apostles there regarded themselves as superior to Paul and Barnabas. Paul and Barnabas were apostles to the uncircumcision, to the Gentiles, whereas those in Jerusalem were apostles to the circumcision. Spiritually speaking, however, Paul was superior to Peter, John, and James. The attitude of superiority that prevailed in Jerusalem was a factor that contributed to the destruction of that city in 70 A.D., ~ Witness Lee

Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified. ~ P.D. James

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting. ~ P.D. James

Christian bashing is alive and well on college and university campuses also. In fact, it's ever more direct and overt because Christianity is not 'politically correct.' Never has been. Never will be. ~ D. James Kennedy

The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret. ~ P.D. James

The star of Bethlehem was a star of hope that led the wise men to the fulfillment of their expectations, the success of their expedition. Nothing in this world is more fundamental for success in life than hope, and this star pointed to our only source for true hope: Jesus Christ. ~ D. James Kennedy

The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics. ~ P.D. James

Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature immediately comes up with a better mouse. ~ James D. Carswell

I do read P.D. James because she pays much more attention to character, to a particular atmosphere or setting. But most mystery writers, I think, are controlled by the plot. ~ Martha Grimes

All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius. ~ P.D. James

For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living. ~ P.D. James

The guardian angel
And little devil
Sitting on my shoulders
Pass a bottle
Back and forth
Laughing
At my shortcomings
So the clown in me
Steals it
And we all end up
Drunk and naked
Dancing around
A bonfire
Adding ingredients
To the gumbo ~ James D. Casey IV

Mrs. Russell made us both sit down with a glass of milk. "And I have a special treat for you," she said. I'm not lying. She really said that. I held my breath because of the last special treat at the Daughertys', but it didn't help, because when Mrs. Russell came back, she came back with a loaf of banana bread. Banana bread! And James said, "How about we have some jam with that?" and Mrs. Russell said, "Jam? Then you wouldn't be able to taste the bananas," and James said, "Ma, I hate bananas," and she said, "But I'm sure that Doug enjoys them," and I said, "I think I'm still full from lunch, so the milk's fine," and then Mrs. Russell picked up the plate with the banana bread on it, and you might not believe this, but she started to laugh and laugh a d laugh, until Mr. Russell came out to the kitchen to see what was so funny and she showed him the banana bread and he said, "I hate bananas," and we all started to laugh until Mrs. Russell said, "I hate bananas too," and you can imagine us all laughing until we were crying and finally Mrs. Russell took the banana bread outside to break it up for the birds-"Let's hope they like bananas"-and then I showed Mr. Russell Aaron Copland's Autobiography: Manuscript Edition, and he stopped laughing. ~ Gary D. Schmidt

You have the ingredients inside you to bake the cake you desire, Start Mixing! ~ James D. Wilson