Top 100 Crichton Quotes
#1. When I started writing, I was reading people such as Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton, who did 'Jurassic Park,' which is possibly the most action-filled book you'll read, apart from mine, and I said to myself, 'Why aren't these guys doing big-scale action like you would see in a movie?'
Matthew Reilly
#2. I've always wanted to do a Crichton book. I really love his writing.
Richard Donner
#3. 'The Admirable Crichton' is probably Barrie's most famous work after 'Peter Pan', nearly a pendant to that classic.
Michael Dirda
#4. THE THREE is really wonderful. A mix of Michael Crichton and Shirley Jackson, hard to put down and vastly entertaining.
Stephen King
#5. I would characterize Moonlit Nights as a mix between Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's 'The Relic' and 'Congo' by Michael Crichton. If those books had a baby and that baby was a werewolf then that would be my book!
Jacob Parr
#6. Scorpius to Crichton "I know you're living on a stolen Leviathan with escaped prisoners, and I know that Leviathan is pregnant." "You know who the daddy is?
Paul Simpson
#7. When I sit down in front of a Windows machine, I can't write; when I sit down in front of my Mac, I can write. So I only use Macs.
Michael Crichton
#8. The duty of the people is to tend to their own affairs.
The duty of government is to help them do it.
This is the pasta of politics.
The inspired leader, the true prince, no matter how great, can only be sauce upon the pasta.
Bombolini
Robert Crichton
#9. The meaning of these discoveries has not yet been sorted out, but it is certainly now impossible to regard the prehistoric Europeans as savages idly
Michael Crichton
#10. In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better.
Michael Crichton
#12. Kids are more advanced these days. The teenage years now start at 11.
Michael Crichton
#13. The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.
Michael Crichton
#14. But as Alston Chase put it, when the search for truth is confused with political
Michael Crichton
#15. Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.
Michael Crichton
#16. The natural world had gone badly wrong. Everything that mankind is doing on the planet had upset the delicate balance of nature. The pollution, the rampant industrialization, the loss of habitat-when animals were squeezed and cornered, they behave viciously, in a desperate effort to survive.
Michael Crichton
#17. Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.
Michael Crichton
#18. Free trade is meaningless unless there is also fair trade.
Michael Crichton
#19. Morality must keep up with technology because if a person is faced with the choice of being moral and dead or immoral and alive, they'll choose life everytime.
Michael Crichton
#20. The trouble with this country," he said, "is that the women have no guts.They'd rather slink off and have a dangerous, illegal operation performed than change the laws. The legislators are all men, and men don't bear babies; they can afford to be moralistic.
Michael Crichton
#21. All human behavior has a reason. All behavior is solving a problem.
Michael Crichton
#22. They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.'
And?'
Chaos theory throws it right out the window.
Michael Crichton
#23. Chaos theory describes nonlinear systems. It's now become a very broad theory that's been used to study everything from the stock market to heart rhythms. A very fashionable theory. Very trendy to apply it to any complex system where there might be unpredictability.
Michael Crichton
#24. It's marked as an object," Wu said. In computer terminology, an "object" was a block of code that could be moved around and used, the way you might move a chair in a room.
Michael Crichton
#26. Nobody smart knows what they want to do until they get into their twenties or thirties.
Michael Crichton
#27. Dr. Grant, my dear Dr. Sattler ... Welcome to Jurassic Park.
Michael Crichton
#28. The rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan. To it, we are like flashes in the dark.
Michael Crichton
#29. The risk is too great. A man cannot place too much faith in any one thing, neither a woman, nor a horse, nor a weapon, nor any single thing.
Michael Crichton
#30. Hammond turned to Gennaro. "You know, of course, what Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler do. They are paleontologists. They dig up dinosaurs." And then he began to laugh, as if he found the idea very funny.
Michael Crichton
#31. In the eyes of all of them was the hollow stare of fear, and there was hollowness in their merriment, too.
Michael Crichton
#32. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
Michael Crichton
#33. They don't have intelligence. They have what I call 'thintelligence.' They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it 'being focused.' They don't see the surround. They don't see the consequences.
Michael Crichton
#35. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud.
Michael Crichton
#36. When I get sick, I go to my doctor like everyone else. A doctor has powerful tools that may help me. Or those tools may hurt me, make me worse. I have to decide. It's my life. It's my responsibility.
Michael Crichton
#37. The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.
Michael Crichton
#38. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
Michael Crichton
#40. They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can't just watch. They can't just appreciate. They can't just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist's job,
Michael Crichton
#41. Although knowledge of how things work is sufficient to allow manipulation of nature, what humans really want to know is why things work. Children don't ask how the sky is blue. They ask why the sky is blue.
Michael Crichton
#42. Your business is not hardware. Your business is communications. Your business is access to information.
Michael Crichton
#43. Without question, the notion of the doctor as a legitimate fee-for-service entrepreneur, making his fortune from misfortunes of is patients, is old-fashioned, distasteful, and doomed.
Michael Crichton
#44. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.
Michael Crichton
#45. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.
Michael Crichton
#46. Too much change is as destructive as too little. Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish.
Michael Crichton
#47. Reality is always greater - much greater - than what we know, than whatever we can say about it.
Michael Crichton
#48. Take it easy, Norman. When the psychiatrist goes crazy, it's a bad sign.
Michael Crichton
#50. The extreme positions of the Crossfire Syndrome require extreme simplification - framing the debate in terms which ignore the real issues.
Michael Crichton
#51. I suspect everybody has a degree of psychic ability, just as a everybody has a degree of athletic or artistic ability. Some people have special gifts; other people have a particular interest that leads them to develop their abilities. But the phenomenon itself is ordinary and widespread.
Michael Crichton
#52. In his view, a theory was nothing more than a substitute for experience put forth by someone who didn't know what he was talking about.
Michael Crichton
#53. Herger said to me, "Be thankful, for you are fortunate."
I inquired the source of my fortune. Herger said in reply, "If you have the fear of high places, than this day you shall overcome it; and so you shall have faced a great challenge; and so you shall be adjudged a hero.
Michael Crichton
#54. All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they'll tell you will be wrong.
Michael Crichton
#56. You must first learn patience, if you wish to learn anything at all.
Michael Crichton
#58. They always say they didn't. I never heard of one who said, 'You know, I deserve this.' Never happens.
Michael Crichton
#59. There is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us.
Michael Crichton
#62. Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism.
Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.
Michael Crichton
#64. It's better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear.
Michael Crichton
#65. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.
Michael Crichton
#66. Science is the most exciting and sustained enterprise of discovery in the history of our species. It is the great adventure of our time. We live today in an era of discovery that far outshadows the discoveries of the New World five hundred years ago.
Michael Crichton
#67. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and human activity is the probable cause.
Michael Crichton
#69. People aren't studying the natural world any more, they're mining it. It's a looter mentality. Anything new or unknown is automatically of interest, because it might have value. It might be worth a fortune.
Michael Crichton
#70. Whoever has the power in society determines what can be studied, determines what can be observed, determines what can be thought.
Michael Crichton
#71. Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind.
Michael Crichton
#72. Caring is irrelevant. Desire to do good is irrelevant. All that counts is knowledge and results
Michael Crichton
#73. For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.
Michael Crichton
#75. And because you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can accomplish something quickly.
Michael Crichton
#76. Anyone who says he knows God's intention is showing a lot of very human ego.
Michael Crichton
#77. In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.
Michael Crichton
#78. They didn't understand what they were doing.
I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.
Michael Crichton
#79. Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way.
Michael Crichton
#80. There is a problem with that island. It is an accident waiting to happen.
Michael Crichton
#81. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science.
Michael Crichton
#82. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
Michael Crichton
#83. On the video monitor, they saw Ted Fielding slap the polished sphere and shout, "Open! Open Sesame! Open up, you son of a bitch!"
The sphere did not respond.
Michael Crichton
#85. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But
Michael Crichton
#86. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can't be given away : it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline.
Michael Crichton
#87. In a sense, he thought, all we consist of is memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built upon the foundation of shared memories that we call history and science.
Michael Crichton
#88. theoretician, his reputation secured in probability-density functions
Michael Crichton
#89. All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don't you take it away from yourself.
Michael Crichton
#90. Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.
Michael Crichton
#92. That's human nature. Nobody does anything until it's too late.
Michael Crichton
#94. There isn't any delusion. It is absolutely clear that this body energy is a genuine phenomenon of some kind.
Michael Crichton
#95. One may even suspect that there is more to reality than measurements will ever reveal.
Michael Crichton
#96. it was "the hardest damn thing I ever did in my life. I don't care how many feathers a man wears in his hair, he's still a man. One of them, Red Legs, looked at me and said 'do you think this is fair? Would you sign such a paper?' and I could not meet his eyes. It made me sick.
Michael Crichton
#97. Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.
Michael Crichton
#99. And entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.
Michael Crichton
#100. It takes enormous effort to avoid all theories and just see.
Michael Crichton
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