“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.”

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 is notoriously difficult to define the word living.

You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

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.

Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.

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.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

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.

Gorgeous hair is the best revenge.

The earth has disappeared beneath my feet, It fled from all my ecstasy. Now like a singing air creature I feel the rose keep opening.

If all babies are so cute, how the hell do we have so many ugly people in the world?

A lovely face is the solace of wounded hearts and the key of locked-up gates.

Every person thinks his own intellect perfect, and his own child handsome.

A handsome woman is a jewel; a good woman is a treasure.

Whatever makes an impression on the heart seems lovely in the eye.

These are my new shoes. They’re good shoes. They won’t make you rich like me, they won’t make you rebound like me, they definitely won’t make you handsome like me. They’ll only make you have shoes like me. That’s it.