Michael Crichton Quotes

156 Sourced Quotes

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
In the conservative region far from the chaotic edge, individual elements coalesce slowly, showing no clear pattern.

Michael Crichton
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
Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.

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
It took a while to realize that a debugging period invariably followed the introduction of any new program. The whole idea of debugging puts people off, though I don't know why.

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

Michael Crichton
I'll give you a graphic display," Gerhard said. He punched buttons, wiping the screen. After a moment, cross-hatching for a graph appeared and the points began to blink on.

Michael Crichton
Each person bears a fear which is special to him. One man fears a close space and another man fears drowning; each laughs at the other and calls him stupid. Thus fear is only a preference, to be counted the same as the preference for one woman or another, or mutton for pig, or cabbage for onion.

Michael Crichton
Face the facts, all these environmental organizations are thirty, forty, fifty years old. They have big buildings, big obligations, big staffs. They may trade on their youthful dreams, but the truth is, they're now part of the establishment. And the establishment works to preserve the status quo. It just does.

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
Let's keep it in perspective, Hammond said. You get the engineering correct and the animals will fall into place.

Michael Crichton
Conversation and statistics. Really boring.

Michael Crichton
Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody 2says the consensus of scientists agrees that E = mc. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

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

Michael Crichton
Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railroads, government, and police.

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

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

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

Michael Crichton