“You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.

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.

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.

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

Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.

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

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.

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.

A busy life is a wasted life.

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.

The past is no more; the future not yet. Nothing exists except the here and now. Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at our hands.

If heaven exists, to know that there’s laughs, that would be a great thing.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.

You must accept the fact that there is no help but self-help. I cannot tell you how to gain freedom since freedom exists within you.

Love is life on a higher plain of existence, working through man to unite the forces of nature into a perfect whole.

It’s a struggle but that’s why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.