James D. Watson Quotes

A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

A man who cannot think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have acquired.

Instead of silencing speakers on campus, perhaps do what you're supposed to in college instead: listen to someone who thinks differently than you do.

I just love to read, learn, and think through complex things.

I spent a lot of time in college. I was just being academic and discovering myself through reason and analysis.

People who are for diversity of thought, actually, are okay with hearing some opinions that they don't like. I quite literally see none of that on the Left.

I would say that I am an academic in politics. I have never abandoned my academic approach to observe reality, independently from the subject and its constant changes.

My Grinnell education didn't prepare me directly for the work that I'm doing, but it did give me the tools that I needed to focus my curiosity.

I like thinking and being able to answer questions that are tough to answer. You have to try to figure out how to get a good answer and look intelligent.

The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.

Articulateness is not the only way that intelligence manifests itself.

The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

Whoso shrinks from ideas ends by having nothing but sensations.

The fruit of liberal education is not learning, but the capacity and desire to learn, not knowledge, but power.

In the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on, people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much.

I think you have to be left-brained, to a certain extent, to understand science. I can talk about it, but I can't do it.

Hell must be a place where you are only allowed to read what you agree with.

Good thinkers are always in demand. A person who knows how may always have a job, but the person who knows why will always be his boss.

Actually learning ancient Greek was a brilliant practice of mine because you'd sit there and you'd read a sentence and sometimes it would take you a day, an entire day to figure out one sentence. But it really trains you to be analytical, to think in a certain way to try and interpret what something means. So I've been thinking like that my whole life and then I love Machiavelli and I love thinking about politics that way. So it's sort of all that put together and then the good luck to meet a man who is sort of interested in the same thing.

Unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a church, for the frightened or greedy victims of some (ancient, or modern) myth, or for the weak and willing followers of some tyrant. Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. And a method that encourages variety is also the only method that is comparable with a humanitarian outlook.

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

I think, though, that we need to be armed with the critical thinking skills that lawyers and scientists and journalists such as yourself have. We all need to have those as we make our way through the day. And they're not that hard to acquire.