Francis Collins Quotes

• Francis Collins / Physician

I'm a pretty informal guy. I ride a Harley.

• Francis Collins / Physician

God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.

• Francis Collins / Physician

The airman must possess absolutely untroubled nerves.

• Francis Collins / Physician

I think God appreciates that we appreciate his creation.

• Francis Collins / Physician

Science's tools will never prove or disprove God's existence.

• Francis Collins / Physician

As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data.

• Francis Collins / Physician

God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible.

• Francis Collins / Physician

What faith has not been used by demagogues as a club over somebody's head?

• Francis Collins / Physician

I've never heard God speak out loud to me. That's not an experience I have had.

• Francis Collins / Physician

Sometimes you develop a passion for something because of some personal experience.

• Francis Collins / Physician

I think there are people who's lives have been saved because of the study of the genome.

• Francis Collins / Physician

By committing the scientific method to religious claims you're committing a logical fallacy

• Francis Collins / Physician

By investigating God's majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.

• Francis Collins / Physician

What more powerful form of study of mankind could there be than to read our own instruction book?

• Francis Collins / Physician

God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people.

• Francis Collins / Physician

I believe in the literal rising of the body of Christ. It's the cornerstone of my Christian faith.

• Francis Collins / Physician

In my own experience as a physician, I have not seen a miraculous healing, and I don't expect to see one.

• Francis Collins / Physician

Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.

• Francis Collins / Physician

I'm a serious Christian. I take my faith seriously. I try to practice it every day of the week, not just on Sunday.

• Francis Collins / Physician

The best diet is the one that can be sustained over the long term, combined with other healthful lifestyle behaviors.

• Francis Collins / Physician

Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool - and how important - their work really is.

• Francis Collins / Physician

All illnesses have some heredity contribution. It's been said that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger.

• Francis Collins / Physician

We give our kids vaccinations. That's a biological enhancement that's considered not just acceptable but actually admirable.

• Francis Collins / Physician

Nobody gets argued all the way into becoming a believer on the sheer basis of logic and reason. That requires a leap of faith.

• Francis Collins / Physician

When does life begin? When does the soul enter? That's a religious question. Science is not going to be able to help with that.

• Francis Collins / Physician

One must dig deeply into opposing points of view in order to know whether your own position remains defensible. Iron sharpens iron.

• Francis Collins / Physician

A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.

• Francis Collins / Physician

We are still working with an incomplete compass. The time is right to bring the full power of genomics to bear on the problem of cancer.

• Francis Collins / Physician

The blooming of a flower is, in my mind, not a miracle. It's something that we can understand on the basis of molecular biology these days.

• Francis Collins / Physician

I'm always feeling like I'm lacking wisdom. This reassurance that one can ask God for that and it will happen is certainly reassuring to me.

• Francis Collins / Physician

Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong.

• Francis Collins / Physician

If God is real, and I believe he is, then he is outside of nature. He is, therefore, not limited by the laws of nature in the way that we are.

• Francis Collins / Physician

So much of what we are currently seeing as far as human suffering and misery comes from diseases that should have been preventable but were not.

• Francis Collins / Physician

A technological advance of a major sort almost always is overestimated in the short run for its consequences - and underestimated in the long run.

• Francis Collins / Physician

Science's domain is the natural. If you want to understand the natural world and be sure you're not misleading yourself, science is the way to do it.

• Francis Collins / Physician

For delightfully quirky descriptions of bizarre neurological syndromes that teach us a lot about how the brain works, there is no match for Oliver Sacks.

• Francis Collins / Physician

I took care of young adults with cystic fibrosis when I was in my residency training and found this to be a disease that was desperately in need of some explanation.

• Francis Collins / Physician

As our closest relatives, they (chimpanzees) tell us special things about what it means to be a primate and, ultimately, what it means to be a human at the DNA level.

• Francis Collins / Physician

God decided to create a species with whom he could have fellowship. Who are we to say that evolution was a dumb way to do it? It was an incredibly elegant way to do it.

• Francis Collins / Physician

The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful.

• Francis Collins / Physician

I trained initially as a physical chemist, and then, after becoming interested in biology, I went to medical school and learned how to be a physician. So, I'm a physician scientist.

• Francis Collins / Physician

Many people struggle with losing weight and then regaining it. But there is no convincing evidence that the effort to lose weight actually promotes more weight gain in the long run.

• Francis Collins / Physician

Proponents of intelligent design don't accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection.

• Francis Collins / Physician

As you kind of get over the anxiety about [science and evolution], it actually adds to your sense of awe about this amazing universe that we live in, it doesn't subtract from it at all.

• Francis Collins / Physician

Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page.

• Francis Collins / Physician

Evolution, as a mechanism, can be and must be true. But that says nothing about the nature of its author. For those who believe in God, there are reasons now to be more in awe, not less.

• Francis Collins / Physician

My own area of expertise is the genetics of human disease. I was fortunate to be part of the team that found the genes for cystic fibrosis, and Huntington's disease and neurofibromatosis.

• Francis Collins / Physician

I believe God did intend, in giving us intelligence, to give us the opportunity to investigate and appreciate the wonders of His creation. He is not threatened by our scientific adventures.

• Francis Collins / Physician

The word 'living' has so many connotations that I'm almost reluctant to try to define it scientifically because it sounds as if I'm then downgrading all the other significances of that word.

• Francis Collins / Physician

C.S. Lewis had a big influence on me in this spiritual realm - this sort of sense of longing. A longing for a knowledge that is just outside of our reach, a knowledge for a spiritual connection.