Francis Crick Quotes

There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.

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

The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he'll fight and die for it.

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

A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.

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

You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

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.

Evolution is cleverer than you are.

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

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

My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists': "If you want to understand function, study structure".

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

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.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.

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

A busy life is a wasted life.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.

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.