The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.
FRANCIS CRICKChance is the only source of true novelty.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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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 -
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.
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Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.
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.
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There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
FRANCIS CRICK -
Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
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My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure”.
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In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.
FRANCIS CRICK -
A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.
FRANCIS CRICK -
Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
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.
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The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
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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 -
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.
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A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
FRANCIS CRICK