Top 35 Kary Mullis Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Sometimes a good idea comes to you when you are not looking for it. Through an improbable combination of coincidence, naivete and lucky mistakes...”

— Kary Mullis

2. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

3. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

4. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

5. “The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.”

— Kary Mullis

6. “I’m not politically correct.”

— Kary Mullis

7. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

8. “Science grows like a weed every year.”

— Kary Mullis

9. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

10. “We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.”

— Kary Mullis

11. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

12. “You can’t ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.”

— Kary Mullis

13. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

14. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

15. “Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.”

— Kary Mullis

16. “Any time a magnet wiggles, no matter how small it is, or how fast or slow it wiggles, it makes some kind of light. Most light is made by little magnets called molecules, and our eyes are tuned to a very narrow range of it.”

— Kary Mullis

17. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

18. “If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.”

— Kary Mullis

19. “I can say exactly what I feel about any issue, and I’m going to do that.”

— Kary Mullis

20. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

21. “I like writing about biology, not doing it.”

— Kary Mullis

22. “I encountered a glowing green raccoon riding a neon orange motorcycle at my cabin in the woods of northern California around midnight one night in 1985. The raccoon proceeded to metamorphose into a singing dolphin at the stroke of midnight.”

— Kary Mullis

23. “I think I might have been stupid in some respects, it if weren’t for my psychedelic experiences.”

— Kary Mullis

24. “Fish don’t know much about water, and people didn’t know much about air.”

— Kary Mullis

25. “Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.”

— Kary Mullis

26. “I’m not driven by being understood.”

— Kary Mullis

27. “The biggest battle I fought with the danger officer was over the fact that I insisted on keeping my lunch and a case of Beck’s beer in the same fridge in which I kept my radioactive isotopes.”

— Kary Mullis

28. “I love a microphone and a big crowd; I’m an entertainer, I guess.”

— Kary Mullis

29. “Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.”

— Kary Mullis

30. “Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.”

— Kary Mullis

31. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

32. “My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.”

— Kary Mullis

33. “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.”

— Kary Mullis

34. “I’m really optimistic in the mornings.”

— Kary Mullis

35. “The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me.”

— Kary Mullis

36. “It only needs to be convincing to the misinformed voter. Some of the big truths voters have accepted have little or no scientific basis. And these include the belief that AIDS is caused by human immunodeficiency virus, the belief that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming, and the belief that the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere has created a hole in the ozone layer. The illusions go even deeper into our everyday lives when they follow us to the grocery store.”

— Kary Mullis