Francis Crick

If you want to get ahead in science, you have to be prepared to be a bit of a bastard.

We have discovered the secret of life.

It is not often that a man is given the chance to make such a discovery.

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.

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.

Our brains are machines.

There is no soul.

I do not believe that God exists.

If you are not a little bit mad, you will never discover anything new.

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

One of the most striking features of the universe is that it is so empty.

The origin of life is a scientific problem.

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

It is notoriously difficult to get rid of a really bad idea.

If you want to understand function, study structure.

The brain is a machine that makes theories.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

The most important thing for me is to understand.

I'm a reductionist.

What is true of the brain is true of the universe.