Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not politically correct.
I'm not driven by being understood.
Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.
Science grows like a weed every year.
I'm really optimistic in the mornings.
I like writing about biology, not doing it.
Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.
Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.
I love a microphone and a big crowd; I'm an entertainer, I guess.
PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.
Fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air.
I can say exactly what I feel about any issue, and I'm going to do that.
People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does.
The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me.
The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.
Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.
I think I might have been stupid in some respects, it if weren't for my psychedelic experiences.
Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world.
If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.
My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.
Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.
We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.
Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.
It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all.
You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.
You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.
Sometimes a good idea comes to you when you are not looking for it. Through an improbable combination of coincidence, naivete and lucky mistakes.
Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don't mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it.
We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.
Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.
Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this.
People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.
In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse.
And all I knew about drugs was what I read in magazines like Time and Life. I learned that marijuana was a dangerous addictive drug and that I should stay away from it.
I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
Until I was five, my immediate family lived near my grandfather's farm where my mother had grown up and, with the exception of a few modern conveniences, had not changed a lot over the years.
Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there.
There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for melancholy of relationships past. It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music.
Global warmers predict that global warming is coming, and our emissions are to blame. They do that to keep us worried about our role in the whole thing. If we aren't worried and guilty, we might not pay their salaries. It's that simple.
Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.
There are a lot of people for whom psychedelics have been really beneficial. But I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. Some are just not ready but society would benefit from letting people who are ready for psychedelics have legal acces to them.
Its not even probable, let alone scientifically proven, that HIV causes AIDS. If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There are no such documents.
My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.
I went to high school in Columbia. I met my first wife, Richards, whom I married while I was working on a B.S. in chemistry at Georgia Tech. She bore Louise, and I studied. I learned most of the useful technical things - math, physics, chemistry - that I now use during those four years.
My father, Cecil Banks Mullis, and mother, formerly Bernice Alberta Barker, grew up in rural North Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My dad's family had a general store, which I never saw. My grandparents on his side had already died before I started noticing things.
My grandfather milked several cows twice a day and supplied the neighbours with dairy products. He liked to go visiting around the county on Saturdays, and he also enjoyed the neighbours when they came by once a week with their empty milk jars. He walked them out to their cars and hung over the driver's side window until they drove off.