“If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.”

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers. He seemed to have very strong biological intuitions but unfortunately of negative sign.

A final proof of our ideas can only be obtained by detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here.

A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.

We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +’s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +’s.

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.

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.

You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman.

All the men of the Old Testament were polygamists, and Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were celibates, and condemned marriage by both precept and example.

Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.

The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities.

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church’s opposition to every advance in every field of science. . . .

The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.