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 D. Watson

Teacher Respect Power

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 D. Watson

Truth Science Youthful

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 D. Watson

Science Pet Freedom

It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.

James D. Watson

You UN Thing

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 D. Watson

Sympathy World Will

Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.

James D. Watson

Years Year Tin

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 D. Watson

Success Good Without

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 D. Watson

Time Science Men

DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.

James D. Watson

Worth Us T

I want to see cancer cured in my lifetime. It might be.

James D. Watson

Time Life Want

Great wealth could make an enormous difference over the next decade if they sensibly support the scientific elite. Just the elite. Because the elite makes most of the progress. You should worry about people who produce really novel inventions, not pedantic hacks.

James D. Watson

Great You Worry

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 D. Watson

Respect Great Years

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 D. Watson

Way T Son

I wish there would be more movies about scientists.

James D. Watson

Movies Would Wish

Our goal should be to understand our differences.

James D. Watson

Understand UN Tan

I don't want to die until I see cancer cured.

James D. Watson

Want Until UN

As an educator, I have always striven to see that the fruits of the American Dream are available to all.

James D. Watson

Ways Way T

An idea can be tested, whereas if you have no idea, nothing can be tested and you don't understand anything. The molecule that you make when you are getting sunburned or when you eat a lot of food is part of the same molecule that contains an endorphin or an opiate. No one has ever had a hypothesis about why the two are together.

James D. Watson

Food Art You

I have a son, who is a... not an ordinary form of schizophrenia, but clearly, cannot take care of himself. And the great fear of then, of all parents is, when the parents die, who takes care of your child? And the answer is: they become homeless.

James D. Watson

Home Great Fear

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 D. Watson

Men Whose Who

I've had strong opinions probably since I was born. It makes you unpopular, but what can you do?

James D. Watson

You Unpopular UN

A clone of Einstein wouldn't be stupid, but he wouldn't necessarily be any genius, either.

James D. Watson

My whole life has been basically trying to find intelligent students or, you know, highly motivated students and giving them an opportunity to do good science.

James D. Watson

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.

James D. Watson

If you succeed with your first dream, it helps. You know, people trust you, possibly, for the second one. They give you a chance to play out your second one.

James D. Watson

We're not all equal, it's simply not true. That isn't science.

James D. Watson

If we could honestly promise young couples that we knew how to give them offspring with superior character, why should we assume they would decline? Common sense tells us that if scientists find ways to greatly improve human capabilities, there will no stopping the public from happily seizing them.

James D. Watson

To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly.

James D. Watson

You move forward through knowledge. You prevail through knowledge. I love the word 'prevail.' Prevail!

James D. Watson

If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true.

James D. Watson

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 D. Watson

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 D. Watson

Here at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, we have genetically rearranged various viruses and bacteria as part of our medical research. In fact, we have been able to create entirely new types of DNA molecules by splicing together the genetic information from different organisms - recombinant DNA.

James D. Watson

I wanted to see if I could write a good book.

James D. Watson

I started doing science when I was effectively 20, a graduate student of Salvador Luria at Indiana University. And that was - you know, it took me about two years, you know, being a graduate student with Luria deciding I wanted to find the structure of DNA; that is, DNA was going to be my objective.

James D. Watson

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 D. Watson

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 D. Watson

The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.

James D. Watson

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 D. Watson

I do think one success of Northern Europe, which the United States came from, was its willingness to accept innovation in business practices like Adam Smith and the whole Enlightenment. It essentially made the merchant class free instead of controlled by the king and aristocracy. That was essential.

James D. Watson

Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.

James D. Watson

I have been much blessed.

James D. Watson

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 D. Watson

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

James D. Watson

My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.

James D. Watson

You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.

James D. Watson

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

James D. Watson

There are many people of color who are very talented.

James D. Watson

I am thrilled to see my genome.

James D. Watson

Some think there is something wrong about enhancing people.

James D. Watson

It's so difficult writing about living people.

James D. Watson