Francis Crick

To understand the brain, we need to know how neurons work, how they are connected, and how they communicate.

The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.

I myself, like many scientists, believe that the soul is imaginary and that what we call our mind is simply a way of talking about the functions of our brain.

The view of ourselves as 'ghosts in the machine' is a legacy of our past, not a scientific conclusion.

Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.

The age of the earth is about 4.6 billion years. The time available for the origin of life seems to have been relatively short, just a few hundred million years.

Directed panspermia: the theory that life was deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet.

It is possible that life arrived here from somewhere else, perhaps as spores driven by the radiation pressure of light.

The genetic code is not an accident; it is a frozen accident.

The balance of evidence both from the earth and from the moon suggests that there is no life in our solar system except on earth.

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.

The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.

A theory that fits all the facts is bound to be wrong, as some of the facts will be wrong.

The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.

In research, you don't aim for a goal, you aim for a direction.

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

I would not spend my time on anything that I could not prove experimentally.

The basic idea of the double helix was simple. That's what made it beautiful.