Top 300 Michael Crichton Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear.”

— Michael Crichton

52. “Without question, the notion of the doctor as a legitimate fee-for-service entrepreneur, making his fortune from misfortunes of his patients, is old-fashioned, distasteful, and doomed.”

— Michael Crichton

53. “I have more respect for people who change their views after acquiring new information than for those who cling to views they held thirty years ago. The world changes. Ideologues and zealots don’t.”

— Michael Crichton

54. “Readers probably haven’t heard much about it yet, but they will. Quantum technology turns ordinary reality upside down.”

— Michael Crichton

55. “No one escapes from life alive.”

— Michael Crichton

56. “And entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.”

— Michael Crichton

57. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

59. “Animals die, friends die, and I shall die, but one thing never dies, and that is the reputation we leave behind at our death.”

— Michael Crichton

60. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

61. “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?”

— Michael Crichton

62. “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

63. “These animals are genetically engineered to be unable to survive in the real world. They can only live here in Jurassic Park. They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners.”

— Michael Crichton

64. “All major changes are like death,” he said. “You can’t see to the other side until you are there.” And he closed his eyes.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

66. “Of all the ways you can limit yourself, your own self-definition is the most powerful.”

— Michael Crichton

67. “How can you design for people if you don’t know history and psychology? You can’t. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

69. “This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren’t.”

— Michael Crichton

70. “There is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us.”

— Michael Crichton

71. “He’s an engineer. Wu’s the same. They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t see the surround.”

— Michael Crichton

72. “Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

75. “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

76. “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

77. “On the wall behind was a row of chrome letters that said “We Make The Future,” but the words were obscured by a tangle of vines.”

— Michael Crichton

78. “Friendships are nice. So is competence.”

— Michael Crichton

79. “Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud.”

— Michael Crichton

80. “To give up responsibility for our lives is not healthy.”

— Michael Crichton

81. “Attractions so astonishing they would capture the imagination of the entire world.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

83. “Unable to construct genuine nanoassemblers, Xymos was using bacteria to crank out their molecules. This was genetic engineering, not nanotechnology.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

85. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

86. “No man is so good as to be free from all evil, nor so bad as to be worth nothing.”

— Michael Crichton

87. “I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

89. “At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen.” IAN MALCOLM.”

— Michael Crichton

90. “I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it.”

— Michael Crichton

91. “Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale color, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom; wherefore their Creator has not exerted his powers to make many of them.”

— Michael Crichton

92. “You must first learn patience, if you wish to learn anything at all.”

— Michael Crichton

93. “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

94. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

96. “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

97. “He prays because he knows he doesn’t control it. He’s at the mercy of it.”

— Michael Crichton

98. “You’ve never heard of Chaos theory? Non-linear equations? Strange attractors? Ms. Sattler, I refuse to believe you’re not familiar with the concept of attraction.”

— Michael Crichton

99. “Human intelligence was more trouble than it was worth. It was more destructive than creative, more confusing than revealing, more discouraging than satisfying, more spiteful than charitable.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton