Top 100 Crick's Quotes
#1. They were big and black and rubber - the kind of boots you might be wearing as you came in the kitchen door, shaking off your rain slicker and saying, Grab the young'uns, Ma. Crick's a-rising.
Suzanne Brockmann
#2. 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.
Francis Crick
#3. All approaches at a higher level are suspect until confirmed at the molecular level.
Francis Crick
#4. I'm still not a god," he said apologetically. Crick stood behind him and pulled his shoulders back against that wide, strong chest.
"Better than a god," Crick murmured. "You're the reason to have faith.
Amy Lane
#5. Gundhrold's head lowered until his massive beak was only inches away from Amos's nose. "I am a son of the desert. This was once my home - the home of all my kind. I know every crag, every slope, every crick and hollow-"
Amos rolled his eyes. "Every blatherin' speck o' sand?
Gillian Bronte Adams
#6. He told me that Francis Crick and Jim Watson had solved the structure of DNA, so we decided to go across to Cambridge to see it. This was in April of 1953.
Sydney Brenner
#7. Man's inclination to justice makes democracy possible; but man's capacity for injustice makes it necessary.' The optimism we need to prevent ourselves from destroying our own democratic freedoms and, indeed, our own human habitat must be based on reasoned pessimism.
Bernard Crick
#8. Democracy: stored up in heaven; but unhappily has not yet been communicated to us.
Bernard Crick
#9. Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.
Bernard Crick
#10. 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.
Francis Crick
#11. Jim and I hit it off immediately, partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, an impatience with sloppy thinking can naturally to both of us.
Francis Crick
#12. If you want to understand function, study structure,
Francis Crick
#13. Human beings ... are far too prone to generalize from one instance. The technical word for this, interestingly enough, is superstition.
Francis Crick
#14. 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.
Francis Crick
#15. Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
Francis Crick
#16. We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.
Francis Crick
#17. So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn't touch. This gave them a sort of twisted ladder - the famed double helix.
Sam Kean
#18. The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.
Bernard Crick
#19. Unfortunately it makes the unambiguous determination of triplets by these methods much more difficult than would be the case if there were only one triplet for each amino acid.
Francis Crick
#20. Good things don't always lead to bad ones, Crick.
Deb Caletti
#21. I fought for seven years to have creche facilities at the Okinawa Institute of Science of Technology - and was ultimately successful. Less successful have been efforts to get a creche at the new Crick Institute in London, but this is something I will continue to push for.
Tim Hunt
#22. The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he'll fight and die for it.
[As quoted in The New Yorker, April 25, 2011]
Francis Crick
#23. If the double helix was so important, how come you didn't work on It? Ther husband, Linus Pauling, when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Crick, Watson and Wilkins.
Ava Helen Pauling
#24. How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?
Francis Crick
#25. Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.
Bernard Crick
#26. In the words of the late Francis Crick ... You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)
Mary Roach
#27. Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.
Francis Crick
#28. While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research.
Francis Crick
#29. 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.
Francis Crick
#30. The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.
Bernard Crick
#31. One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.
Francis Crick
#32. I have to concentrate more intently when people speak. I always have to position myself on their right side so that I can hear out of my left ear. I sometimes get a crick in my neck from listening. But I don't there's too much else.
Stephanie Beacham
#33. Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
Francis Crick
#34. Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs.
Bernard Crick
#35. He reached a large stream, of the kind the locals called a creek and pronounced crick, and decided to follow it.
Neil Gaiman
#37. How is the base sequence, divided into codons? There is nothing in the backbone of the nucleic acid, which is perfectly regular, to show us how to group the bases into codons.
Francis Crick
#38. My brother then bought 1000 Japanese cameras. They all go, "Crick".
Henny Youngman
#39. Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence ... politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.
Bernard Crick
#40. The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
Francis Crick
#42. Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.
Bernard Crick
#43. A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
Francis Crick
#44. For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the - class as having one too few.
Francis Crick
#46. The RCP's belief that capitalism was on the point of collapse started to look somewhat unconvincing. And
Michael Crick
#47. I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.
Linus Pauling
#48. If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
Francis Crick
#49. You can do reverse engineering, but you can't do reverse hacking.
Francis Crick
#50. BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.
Bernard Crick
#51. In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.
Francis Crick
#52. It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
Francis Crick
#53. Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets.
Francis Crick
#54. It now seems very likely that many of the 64 triplets, possibly most of them, may code one amino acid or another, and that in general several distinct triplets may code one amino acid.
Francis Crick
#55. 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.
Francis Crick
#56. Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.
Bernard Crick
#57. The method of rule of the tyrant and the oligarch is quite simply to clobber, coerce, or overawe all or most other groups in the interest of their own.
Bernard Crick
#58. It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
Francis Crick
#59. Politics is too often regarded as a poor relation, inherently dependent and subsidiary; it is rarely praised as something with a life and character of its own.
Bernard Crick
#60. The major credit I think Jim and I deserve is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold.
Francis Crick
#61. When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.
Francis Crick
#62. 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.
Francis Crick
#63. Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.
Francis Crick
#64. And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God.
Salvador Dali
#65. It is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot.
Francis Crick
#66. It doesn't matter if we're young. If you love someone, and it's right ... We can make it the whole way, Crick.
Deb Caletti
#67. A person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them.
Francis Crick
#68. In an abstract but real sense, Marxism arose through the breakdown first of religion and then of 'reason' as single sources of authority.
Bernard Crick
#70. It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry - which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks - that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.
Francis Crick
#71. 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.
Francis Crick
#73. A politics of vengeance is not politics. Revenge is a recklessness towards the future in a vain attempt to make the present abolish a suffering which is already past.
Bernard Crick
#74. If, for example, all the codons are triplets, then in addition to the correct reading of the message, there are two incorrect readings which we shall obtain if we do not start the grouping into sets of three at the right place.
Francis Crick
#75. An ex-wife is a woman with a crick in the neck from looking back over her shoulder at her matrimony.
Ursula Parrott
#76. Our ... advantage was that we had evolved unstated but fruitful methods of collaboration ... If either of us suggested a new idea, the other, while taking it seriously, would attempt to demolish it in a candid but non-hostile manner.
Francis Crick
#77. What could be more foolish than to base one's entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?
Francis Crick
#78. Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
Francis Crick
#79. Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations.
Walker Percy
#80. The political process is not tied to any particular doctrine. Genuine political doctrines, rather, are the attempt to find particular and workable solutions to this perpetual and shifty problem of conciliation.
Bernard Crick
#81. Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.
Francis Crick
#82. Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.
Bernard Crick
#83. Moreover the incorporation requires the same components needed for protein synthesis, and is inhibited by the same inhibitors. Thus the system is most unlikely to be a complete artefact and is very probably closely related to genuine protein synthesis.
Francis Crick
#84. At lunch Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.
James D. Watson
#85. Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.
Francis Crick
#86. It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid - usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.
Francis Crick
#88. Revolutions as often take place because the old regime simply collapse out of economic inefficiency and bureaucratic rigidity rather than for the reasons given out by their successors taking too much credit, however heroic their actions at the time of crisis (but so often in the past hopeless).
Bernard Crick
#89. It now seems certain that the amino acid sequence of any protein is determined by the sequence of bases in some region of a particular nucleic acid molecule.
Francis Crick
#90. The meaning of this observation is unclear, but it raises the unfortunate possibility of ambiguous triplets; that is, triplets which may code more than one amino acid. However one would certainly expect such triplets to be in a minority.
Francis Crick
#92. There is no great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price.
Bernard Crick
#93. 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.
Francis Crick
#94. A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
Francis Crick
#95. Politics has rough manners, but it is a very useful thing.
Bernard Crick
#96. What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital ... the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins
Matt Ridley
#97. If a government is to do great new things, it will need more support. If a government is to change the world, it will need mass support. This is one of the discoveries of modern government.
Bernard Crick
#98. Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.
Francis Crick
#99. There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.
Francis Crick
#100. The attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, than politics has in fact become totalitarian.
Bernard Crick
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