Francis Crick

"The Astonishing Hypothesis is that '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."

"A scientist's aim in a discussion with his colleagues is not to convince by rhetorical tricks, but to clarify the issue by steps logical and, above all, honest."

"The essence of science is to be interested in how things work and to ask logical questions about them."

"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."

"Be skeptical, but not so skeptical that you believe nothing."

"The scientific approach is to ask an impertinent question, and you are not entitled to avoid it by hiding behind unjustified authority."

"A theory that you can't explain to a bartender is probably no good."

"You look at any major technological advance and before long you realize it had its roots in an earlier era, often quite far back."

"If you want to understand life, don't think of it as something static. Think of it as something that flows."

"The brain is the most complex thing we know in the universe."

"What a scientist says publicly is often not exactly what he believes in private."

"The key to understanding nature is to look at small things."

"Our task is to make sense of the accumulated knowledge of the past."

"Life does not live in the distant past, nor is it reserved for the distant future."

"Everything you see is hidden by the things you don't see."

"The most prudent thing we can do is to think carefully about the very problems we are trying to solve."

"Nobody really understands what consciousness is. Until we do, we are not going to understand ourselves."

"You might think that when we have learned the basic principles of physics and chemistry, we would understand life. But that's not so."

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

"If you want to pursue truth, you must be prepared to be wrong."

"Science attempts to discover how the natural world works, not why it should exist."

"The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it started."

"Memory is not something you acquire, it is something you create."

"We have discovered the secret of life."

"The impact of science on society cannot be overestimated."

"Nothing can be done without hope and confidence."

"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few ideas as possible."

"In my view the basic hope of a physicist is to understand the laws of nature."

"The basic rules of the universe are, to a large extent, mathematical."

"You can't expect to hit the jackpot unless you are willing to take some chances."