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Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science.
Michael Crichton
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The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.
Michael Crichton
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We are all assumed, these days, to reside at one extreme of the opinion spectrum, or another. We are pro-abortion or anti-abortion. We are free traders or protectionist. We are pro-private sector or pro-big government. We are feminists or chauvinists. But in the real world, few of us holds these extreme views. There is instead a spectrum of opinion.
Michael Crichton
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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There isn't any delusion. It is absolutely clear that this body energy is a genuine phenomenon of some kind.
Michael Crichton
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Sanderson laughed. "There's no problem," he said. "Yet. I've got a pretty tough old neck. I can keep it stuck out a while longer."
Michael Crichton
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I don't know why spoons bend, but it seemed clear that almost anyone could do it.
Michael Crichton
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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
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In the conservative region far from the chaotic edge, individual elements coalesce slowly, showing no clear pattern.
Michael Crichton
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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
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Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.
Michael Crichton
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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
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Quote of the day
Joy is like restless day; but peace divine Like quiet night; Lead me, O Lord, — till perfect Day shall shine Through Peace to Light.
Adelaide Anne Procter
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:
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life
real
sense
time
science
power
human
evolutionary
consequences
behavior
society
live
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