131 Quotes by James D. Watson

There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better.

Remember, grab you're future with both hands and mold it into what you want it to be. It's the determined, who create the life they want, while the idle sit by and watch it fade away into nothingness. The future belongs to the exceptional individuals, who can see the light of the future, at the end of the tunnel.

At lunch Francis [Crick] winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.

The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.

No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?

Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them.

The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.

Knowing "why" (an idea) is more important than learning "what" (the fact).