James Watson is an American molecular biologist who was quintessential in the research about the structures of DNA and RNA. He was the one to discover that the essential DNA components (four organic bases) must be linked in definite pairs.
As a renowned scientist, he has numerous interesting quotes regarding biology, zoology, and even human society. In this article, we shall provide you with 50 best quotes by James Watson that will surely intrigue you.
1. “Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.”– James Watson
2. “I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.”– James Watson
3. “People say we are playing God. My answer is: If we don’t play God, who will?”– James Watson
4. “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood. Perhaps in other company he is that way, but I have never had reason so to judge him.”– James Watson
5. “My parents made it clear that I should never display even the slightest disrespect to individuals who had the power to let me skip a half grade or move into more challenging classes. While it was all right for me to know more about a topic than my sixth-grade teacher had ever learned, questioning her facts could only lead to trouble.”– James Watson
6. “We’re not all equal, it’s simply not true. That isn’t science.”– James Watson
7. “I am happy that I can aid those admirable men, both living and dead, who by their pens or their tongues have aided the great cause of human liberty and universal happiness.”– James Watson
8. “Spotting a rare bird is never worth the bite of a cur. Once bitten by a German shepherd, I knew that I preferred cats, even if they are bird-killers. Life is long enough for more than one chance at a rare bird.”– James Watson
9. “The ever quickening advances of science made possible by the success of the Human Genome Project will also soon let us see the essences of mental disease. Only after we understand them at the genetic level can we rationally seek out appropriate therapies for such illnesses as schizophrenia and bipolar disease.”– James Watson
10. “At lunch Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.”– James Watson
11. “DNA was my only gold rush.”– James Watson
12. “The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn’t believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.”– James Watson
13. “I want to see cancer cured in my lifetime. It might be.”– James Watson
14. “It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths.”– James Watson
15. “My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.”– James Watson
16. “It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.”– James Watson
17. “My wife and I have a schizophrenic son. We didn’t want to accept this for 30 years, so we put him under great pressure when we shouldn’t have. He just wanted to be looked after, and we didn’t respect that. We tried to make him independent.”– James Watson
18. “I have an odd theory on happiness, and it bothers people. My general theory is that happiness is a reward for an animal doing what it should be doing. So if a horse runs, it feels happy. Or if you are too thin, you can’t be happy, because evolution wants you to be tense and anxious, trying to wake up in the morning looking for food.”– James Watson
19. “As a child, I lived with being punier than other boys in class. The only consolation was my parents’ empathy – they encouraged constant trips to the local drugstore for chocolate milk shakes to fatten me up. The shakes made me happy, but still, all through grammar school, other kids shoved me around.”– James Watson
20. “The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer.”– James Watson
21. “I first became aware of Charles Darwin and evolution while still a schoolboy growing up in Chicago. My father and I had a passion for bird-watching, and when the snow or the rain kept me indoors, I read his bird books and learned about evolution.”– James Watson
22. “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.”– James Watson
23. “A clone of Einstein wouldn’t be stupid, but he wouldn’t necessarily be any genius, either.”– James Watson
24. “It is extraordinary the extent to which Darwin’s insights not only changed his contemporaries’ view of the world but also continue to be a source of great intellectual stimulation for scientists and nonscientists alike.”– James Watson
25. “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.”– James Watson
26. “It’s so difficult writing about living people.”– James Watson
27. “Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.”– James Watson
28. “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.”– James Watson
29. “Ultimately, we’ll help the people we discriminate against if we try to understand more about them; genetics will lead to a world where there is a sympathy for the underdog.”– James Watson
30. “Some think there is something wrong about enhancing people.”– James Watson
31. “To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly.”– James Watson
32. “If you accept that people are the products of evolution, then you have to have an open mind to the truth. Unfair discrimination exists whether we like it or not; I wouldn’t have married a gum-chewing vegetarian.”– James Watson
33. “The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.”– James Watson
34. “Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting.”– James Watson
35. “I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.”– James Watson
36. “I am thrilled to see my genome.”– James Watson
37. “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.”– James Watson
38. “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.”– James Watson
39. “One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”– James Watson
40. “I wanted to see if I could write a good book.”– James Watson
41. “Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.”– James Watson
42. “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.”
43. “There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.”– James Watson
44. “Our goal should be to understand our differences.”– James Watson
45. “I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.”– James Watson
46. “Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration.”– James Watson
47. “Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.”– James Watson
48. “The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.”– James Watson
49. “One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural, and it was a lesson that my father passed on to me, that knowledge liberates mankind from superstition. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.”– James Watson
50. “Never be the brightest person in the room.”– James Watson
