Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton Quotes
156 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It's all talk — and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it's uninformed talk. Farmers know what they're talking about. City people don't. It's all fantasy.
Michael Crichton
Source
Report...
Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything—evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing—it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.
Michael Crichton
Source
Report...
The emotional aspect seemed more like hazing, like a professional initiation, than education. It was a long time before I understood that how a doctor behaved was at least important as what he knew.
Michael Crichton
Source
Report...
It's hard to decide who's truly brilliant; it's easier to see who's driven, which in the long run may be more important.
Michael Crichton
Source
Report...
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people — the best people, the most enlightened people — do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Michael Crichton
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
There isn't any delusion. It is absolutely clear that this body energy is a genuine phenomenon of some kind.
Michael Crichton
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease. I fear he is right.
Michael Crichton
Source
Report...
"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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
You can draw a lot of curves through three graph points. You can extrapolate it a lot of ways.
Michael Crichton
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am.
Michael Crichton
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Michael Crichton
Creative Commons
Born:
October 23, 1942
Died:
November 4, 2008
(aged 66)
Bio:
John Michael Crichton, MD was an American best-selling author, physician, producer, director and screenwriter, best known for his work in the science fiction, medical fiction and thriller genres.
Known for:
Westworld (1973)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Jurassic World
The 13th Warrior (1999)
Most used words:
people
life
real
sense
time
science
power
human
evolutionary
consequences
behavior
society
live
religion
experience
Michael Crichton on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Michael Crichton Quotes
Michael Crichton Short Quotes
American Film producer Quotes
Film producer Quotes
20th-century Film producer Quotes
Related People
Steven Spielberg
American Director
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes