Top 300 Michael Crichton Quotes (2025 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 think every writer should have tattooed backwards on his forehead, like ambulance on ambulances, the words ’everybody needs an editor.”

— Michael Crichton

54. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

56. “No one escapes from life alive.”

— Michael Crichton

57. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

60. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “Life is too short, and DNA too long.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

71. “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. They don’t see the consequences.”

— Michael Crichton

72. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

74. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

76. “You would think that people who had experienced injustice would be loath to inflict it on others, and yet they do so with alacrity. The victims become victimizers with a chilling righteousness. This is the nature of fanaticism, to attract and provoke extremes of behavior. And this is why fanatics are all the same, whatever specific form their fanaticism takes.”

— Michael Crichton

77. “The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can’t control the climate.”

— Michael Crichton

78. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

80. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

87. “The DNA molecule was so old that its evolution had essentially finished more than two billion years ago.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

90. “They’re engineers,” she said. She was thinking, What did he expect? He must have dealt with engineers at GM. “Emotionally, they’re all thirteen years old, stuck at the age just before boys stop playing with toys, because they’ve discovered girls. They’re all still playing with toys. They have poor social skills, dress badly – but they’re extremely intelligent and well trained, and they are very arrogant in their way. Outsiders are definitely not allowed to play.”

— Michael Crichton

91. “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. This is not a good system for research into those areas of science that affect policy. Even worse, the system works against problem solving. Because if you solve a problem, your funding ends. All that’s got to change.”

— Michael Crichton

92. “In the darkened trailer, Kelly was frightened, but she was reassured at the no-nonsense way Sarah talked about weapons. And Kelly was beginning to see that Sarah didn’t let anything stop her, she just went and did it. This whole attitude of not letting other people stop you, of believing that you could do what you wanted, was something she found herself imitating.”

— Michael Crichton

93. “Everything on that island is perfectly fine.”

— Michael Crichton

94. “Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren’t saints, they’re human beings, and they do what human beings do – lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance, and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That’s human nature. It isn’t going to change.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

100. “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