Top 220 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Crichton - Page 4

For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.

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 protectionists. We are pro-private sector or pro-government. We are feminists or chauvinists. But in the real world, few of us hold these extreme views. There is instead a spectrum of opinion.

Extrapolating from the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants.

You can answer your own question. You already know the answer, if you can just gain access to it.

Nobody smart knows what they want to do until they get into their twenties or thirties.

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.

This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.

Science is the most exciting and sustained enterprise of discovery in the history of our species. It is the great adventure of our time. We live today in an era of discovery that far outshadows the discoveries of the New World five hundred years ago.

Men under stress are fools, and fool themselves.

Power is neither male or female.

The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

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.

Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and instruments, but in the ened your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.

Nobody wants to feel they're not a rebel.

Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications.

The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

She had been living like a hermit herself, in a cramped, seedy apartment in Somerville, spending long hours in the lab. All-nighters had become a regular thing. She didn't have any close friends, didn't go out on dates, didn't even go to the movies by herself. She had sacrificed a normal life in order to get a PhD, and become a scientist.

Sneaking up on it sometimes helps: I've found I can be very productive for an hour before dinner, because there obviously isn't enough time to really do anything, so I can tell myself I'm just screwing around.

Cure the symptoms, cure the disease.

To apply general tools to specific problems is to fail.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.

Reality is always greater - much greater - than what we know, than whatever we can say about it.

Friendships are nice. So is competence.

But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.

They always say they didn't. I never heard of one who said, 'You know, I deserve this.' Never happens.

Expectation works in mysterious ways---and totally unconsciously.

I think every writer should have tattooed backwards on his forehead, like ambulance on ambulances, the words 'everybody needs an editor.

In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right.

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.

You can't get decent Mexican food in DC.

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.

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.

The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge.

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

God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.

One of the most difficult things for a writer in this business to accept is the uncertain fate of one's work.

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.

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.

Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.

Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something ? reality ? that may not be understood at all.