Michael Crichton Quotes

156 Sourced Quotes

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

Michael Crichton
As the practical value of altering consciousness becomes recognized, procedures to effect these alterations will become increasingly ordinary and unremarkable. The whole concept of changing states of consciousness will cease to have a threatening or exotic aspect.

Michael Crichton
The kind of evidence I have seen for clairvoyance or telepathy — evidence that leads me to accept these phenomena as unquestionably real — I have not experienced for the idea of past lives.

Michael Crichton
The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.

Michael Crichton
Steve Jencks: The computer doesn't have any ideas. It only evaluates mine...

Michael Crichton
There isn't any delusion. It is absolutely clear that this body energy is a genuine phenomenon of some kind.

Michael Crichton
We cause our diseases. We are directly responsible for any illness that happens to us.

Michael Crichton
Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.

Michael Crichton
The extreme positions of the Crossfire Syndrome require extreme simplification — framing the debate in terms which ignore the real issues.

Michael Crichton
Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.

Michael Crichton
Scientific power is like inherited wealth; attained without discipline. You read about what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast.

Michael Crichton
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
No man is so good as to be free from all evil, nor so bad as to be worth nothing.

Michael Crichton
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.

Michael Crichton
One may even suspect that there is more to reality than measurements will ever reveal.

Michael Crichton
Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature.

Michael Crichton
People were so naive about plants, Ellie thought. They just chose plants for appearance, as they would choose a picture for the wall. It never occurred to them that plants were actually living things, busily performing all the living functions of respiration, ingestion, excretion, reproduction—and defense.

Michael Crichton
We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

Michael Crichton
The computer informed her that three spaces accounted for eighty-one percent of variance.

Michael Crichton
Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they're not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.

Michael Crichton
John. Trust us on this, we have the figures. We are telling you with ninety-five percent confidence intervals how the people feel.

Michael Crichton
And entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.

Michael Crichton
The basic mechanism of the I Ching had to be the same as the mechanism of the tarot — to provide an ambiguous stimulus to the unconscious mind.

Michael Crichton
I smiled, remembering Art's line about doctors being illpolitical. He meant it the way you used words like illiterate. Art always said doctors not only held no political views, but also were incapable of them. "It's like the military," he had once said. "Political views are considered unprofessional."

Michael Crichton
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

Michael Crichton