Michael crichton quotes

That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.

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.

Yes, you have cancer. Yes, your kids are on drugs. Yes, there is an elephant outside your tent. Now the question becomes, What are you going to do about it? Subsequent emotions may not be pleasant, but the hysteria stops. Hysteria accompanies an unwillingness to look at what is really going on; it promotes an unwillingness to look. We feel we are afraid to look, when actually it is not-looking that makes us afraid. The minute we look, we cease being afraid.

You think you can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. . . . . We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

In a media-saturated world, persistent hype lends unwarranted credulity to the wildest claims.

Harassment is about power---the undue exercise of power by a superior over a subordinate.

A hundred years from now, people will look back on us and laugh. They'll say, 'You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?' They'll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer better fantasies... And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That's the sea. That's real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That's all real. Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else.

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.

One of the most difficult features of direct experience is that it is unfiltered by any theories or expectations. It's hard to observe without imposing a theory to explain what we're seeing, but the trouble with theories, as Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed, but what can be observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories.

The system didn't screw you. The system revealed you.

Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.

We all live every day in virtual environments, defined by our ideas.

Geniuses never pay attention.

The people in Hollywood are fabulously stupid.

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.

Like all trial attorneys, he knew the importance of not dressing too well.

Human beings never think for themselves. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

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.

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.

It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it - and if you don't, you die.

Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.

Sometimes I think man needs to feel a special position within nature, and this leads him to believe that he is either specially hated by other animals or specially cherished. Instead of the truth, which is that he's just another animal on the plain. A smart one, but just another animal.

The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

To give up responsibility for our lives is not healthy.

We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.

Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

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.

Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.

Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.

The doctor is not a miracle worker who can magically save us but, rather, an expert adviser who can assist us in our own recovery.

All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they'll tell you will be wrong.

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.

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.

You are the reason why he exists on this earth. You don't have the right to abandon him just because he's inconvenient or has trouble in school.

Kids didn't have huge backpacks when I was their age. We didn't have backpacks at all. Now it seemed all the kids had them. You saw little second-graders bent over like sherpas, dragging themselves through the school doors under the weight of their packs. Some of the kids had their packs on rollers, hauling them like luggage at the airport. I didn't understand any of this. The world was becoming digital; everything was smaller and lighter. But kids at school lugged more weight than ever.

A man can see by starlight, if he takes the time.

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Working inspires inspiration. Keep working. If you succeed, keep working. If you fail, keep working. If you are interested, keep working. If you are bored, keep working.

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

They didn't understand what they were doing. I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.

Sometimes women scare the hell out of me.

I operate under the assumption that the mass media will never be accurate. ... It operates with the objective to simplify and exaggerate, which is exactly what Walt Disney told his cartoonists.

We cause our diseases. We are directly responsible for any illness that happens to us.

Exercise invigorates the body and sharpens the mind.

I was raised with the idea that if you're not smart enough to do science you can do politics.

The purpose of history is to explain the present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power - profound power. The power to define a whole society.

Social control is best managed through fear.

Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth - that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric.

In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better.

Auschwitz exists because of politicized science.

Science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid - and will be universally accepted - only if it can be reproduced by others, and thereby independently verified. The impersonal rigor of the method has produced enormously powerful results for 400 years. The scientific method is utterly apolitical. A truth in science is verifiable whether you are black or white, male or female, old or young. It’s verifiable whether you know the experimenter, or whether you don’t.

When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?

Even if you don't believe in God, 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.

Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.

It's not easy to cut through a human head with a hacksaw.

I tended to faint when I saw accident victims in the emergency ward, during surgery, or while drawing blood.

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.

In my view, our approach to global warming exemplifies everything that is wrong with our approach to the environment. We are basing our decisions on speculation, not evidence. Proponents are pressing their views with more PR than scientific data. Indeed, we have allowed the whole issue to be politicized-red vs blue, Republican vs Democrat. This is in my view absurd. Data aren't political. Data are data. Politics leads you in the direction of a belief. Data, if you follow them, lead you to truth.

In the information society, nobody thinks. We expect to banish paper, but we actually banish thought.

Story of our species...everyone knows it's coming, but not so soon.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.

The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.

To apply general tools to specific problems is to fail.

False fears are a plague, a modern plague!

The experience of climbing Kilimanjaro affected me so powerfully that, for a long time afterward, if I caught myself saying, "I'm not a person who likes to do that activity, eat that food, listen to that music," I would automatically go out and do what I imagined I didn't like. Generally I found I was wrong about myself - I liked what I thought I wouldn't like. And even if I didn't like the particular experience, I learned I liked having new experiences.

Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another - like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way.

Theories are just fantasies. And they change.

God created dinosaurs. God destroyed dinosaurs. God created Man. Man destroyed God. Man created dinosaurs. Dinosaurs eat man...Woman inherits the earth.

Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes -- with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.

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

All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you are there.

All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don't you take it away from yourself.

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.

It's better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear.

That's human nature. Nobody does anything until it's too late.

In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.

Environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s.

Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science.

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds - and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.

Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other.

...scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young...there is no mastery, old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature...Its a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are.

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.

The minute we look, we cease being afraid.

Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

Caring is irrelevant. Desire to do good is irrelevant. All that counts is knowledge and results

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

The rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan. To it, we are like flashes in the dark.

I believe my life has a value, and i don't want to waste it thinking about clothing. I don't want to think about what i will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion?

The purpose of life is to stay alive. Watch any animal in nature--all it tries to do is stay alive. It doesn't care about beliefs or philosophy. Whenever any animal's behavior puts it out of touch with the realities of its existence, it becomes exinct.

Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.

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.

Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.

Discovery is always rape of the natural world. Always.

He prays because he knows he doesn't control it. He's at the mercy of it.

The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world" of our past. That hope is science.

Increasingly, people perceive no difference between the narcissistic self-serving reporters asking questions, and the narcissistic self-serving politicians who evade them.

Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.

The extreme positions of the Crossfire Syndrome require extreme simplification - framing the debate in terms which ignore the real issues.

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

Life will find a way.

It takes enormous effort to avoid all theories and just see.

You know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct.

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so.

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.

And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there. . . . And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.

Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else.

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 says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

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

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

Keep working. Don't wait for inspiration. Work inspires inspiration. Keep working.

No one escapes from life alive.

Only assholes put a nickname on their business card.

The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief.

Welcome...to Jurassic Park!

All human behavior has a reason. All behavior is solving a problem.

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're being asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

The rules of grammar exist in large part to permit readers and writers to operate from a shared set of expectations.

Everyone has a hidden agenda. Except me!

In order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment.

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.