Michael Crichton Quotes

156 Sourced Quotes

I hadn't traveled with the intention of learning about anything except myself. And the real point of all this travel was not what I had come to believe or disbelieve about the wider world, but what I had learned about myself.

Michael Crichton
We need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.

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

Michael Crichton
Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years - the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.

Michael Crichton
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
What's really wrong with making them the problem is that you abdicate your own responsibility. Once you say some mysterious they is in charge, then you're able to sit back comfortably and complain about how they are doing it.

Michael Crichton
What I knew was that the history of man demonstrated the inexorable triumph of reason over superstition, culminating in our acceptance of science as the best method for learning the truth and exploring the universe.

Michael Crichton
The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock... it will demand that you adapt to it — and if you don't, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced.

Michael Crichton
Let's be clear: all professions look bad in the movies. And there's a good reason for this. Movies don't portray career paths, they conscript interesting lifestyles to serve a plot. So lawyers are all unscrupulous and doctors are all uncaring. Psychiatrists are all crazy, and politicians are all corrupt. All cops are psychopaths, and all businessmen are crooks. Even moviemakers come off badly: directors are megalomaniacs, actors are spoiled brats. Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently?

Michael Crichton
I had thought that women were inherently different from men. And in formulating that difference, I had also objectified women. They were different. They didn't have the same feelings I did. They were they.

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
"I wonder how we can account for such parallelism in door design," Ted said. "The likelihood of its occurring by chance is astronomically small. Why, this door is the perfect size and shape for human beings!"

Michael Crichton
But the point is that we have no facts," Harry said. "We must guess at every single one of these probabilities."

Michael Crichton
I eventually realized that direct experience is the most valuable experience I can have. Western man is so surrounded by ideas, so bombarded with opinions, concepts, and information structures of all sorts, that it becomes difficult to experience anything without the intervening filter of these structures.

Michael Crichton
The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.

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
They are focused on whether they can do something. They never think whether they should do something.

Michael Crichton
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
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
"I did," Gerhard said. "But I don't know any more. We've passed the confidence limits already. They were about plus or minus two minutes for ninety-nine percent."

Michael Crichton
I sometimes think scientists really don't notice that their colleagues have flaws. But in my experience scientists are very human people: which means that some are troubled, deceitful, petty or vain.

Michael Crichton
Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It's bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn thing off. That does it every time. Get my life back.

Michael Crichton
You can draw a lot of curves through three graph points. You can extrapolate it a lot of ways.

Michael Crichton
This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease. I fear he is right.

Michael Crichton
Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am.

Michael Crichton
The fact that the patients were complex human beings with a rich life beyond the hospital never really sank into the consciousness of the residents. Because they had no rich lives beyond the hospital, they assumed no one else did, either. In the end, what they lacked was not medical knowledge but ordinary life experience.

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
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
Writers often say that books aren't written, they're rewritten. And in fact most formal assemblies of information — proposals, applications, speeches, presentations, designs — go through several drafts or revisions.

Michael Crichton