131 Quotes by James D. Watson

If you go into science, I think you better go in with a dream that maybe you, too, will get a Nobel Prize. It's not that I went in and I thought I was very bright and I was going to get one, but I'll confess, you know, I knew what it was.

I never wanted to be liked by the majority of people, but there were always some people that I desperately wanted to be liked by. And so you've got to behave in a way that... the way I put it is that if you want to be a real intellectual, you've got to have someone to save you.

I had become monomaniacal about DNA only in 1951 when I had just turned 23 and as a postdoctoral fellow was temporarily in Naples attending a small May meeting on biologically important macromolecules.

By the age of 11, I was no longer going to Sunday Mass, and going on birdwatching walks with my father. So early on, I heard of Charles Darwin. I guess, you know, he was the big hero. And, you know, you understand life as it now exists through evolution.

'Genes, Girls, and Gamow' was an attempt, even more than 'The Double Helix,' to mix science with one's personal life. With 'The Double Helix,' no one had done it before, but I thought I'd try.

Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting.

Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans favour research using embryonic stem cells and yet politicians continue to pander to the outspoken religious minority that is hampering efforts to develop this potentially valuable technology.

(The National Cancer Program is) a bunch of (obscenity).

The American public is being sold a very nasty bill of goods about cancer.