Top 300 Michael Crichton Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

152. “I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences.”

— Michael Crichton

153. “We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.”

— Michael Crichton

154. “In reality, time doesn’t pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren’t separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn’t a location, you can’t travel to it.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

156. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

157. “Inevitably, underlying instabilities begin to appear.”

— Michael Crichton

158. “Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

160. “He finally decided that children liked dinosaurs because these giant creatures personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority. They were symbolic parents.”

— Michael Crichton

161. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

163. “Classically, the ability to invent and execute plans was believed to be limited to only three species: chimpanzees, gorillas, and human beings. Now.”

— Michael Crichton

164. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

166. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

168. “Science is the business of generating testable hypotheses.”

— Michael Crichton

169. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

170. “People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity-our most necessary resourse?”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

172. “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?”

— Michael Crichton

173. “False fears are a plague, a modern plague!”

— Michael Crichton

174. “Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions. Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences. Once.”

— Michael Crichton

175. “There is no greater pleasure than to win what everyone desires.”

— Michael Crichton

176. “The biggest cause of environmental destruction is poverty. Starving people can’t worry about pollution. They worry about food. Half.”

— Michael Crichton

177. “Plants evolve like every other form of life, and they’ve come up with their own forms of aggression, defense, and so on. In the nineteenth century, most theories concerned animals – nature red in tooth and claw, all that. But now scientists are thinking about nature green in root and stem. We realize that plants, in their ceaseless struggle to survive, have evolved everything from complex symbiosis with other animals, to signaling mechanisms to warn other plants, to outright chemical warfare.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

179. “Today we are surrounded by man and his creations. Man is inescapable, everywhere on the globe, and nature is a fantasy, a dream of the past, long gone.”

— Michael Crichton

180. “The gene,” Dr. Narcejac-Boileau said, “is associated with social dominance and strong control over other people. We have isolated it in sports leaders, CEOs, and heads of state. We believe the gene is found in all dictators throughout history.”

— Michael Crichton

181. “You can’t get decent Mexican food in DC.”

— Michael Crichton

182. “In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.”

— Michael Crichton

183. “When I sit down in front of a Windows machine, I can’t write; when I sit down in front of my Mac, I can write. So I only use Macs.”

— Michael Crichton

184. “Cure the symptoms, cure the disease.”

— Michael Crichton

185. “I was raised with the idea that if you’re not smart enough to do science you can do politics.”

— Michael Crichton

186. “The minute we look, we cease being afraid.”

— Michael Crichton

187. “Sometimes women scare the hell out of me.”

— Michael Crichton

188. “Story of our species,” Malcolm said, laughing. “Everybody knows it’s coming, but not so soon.”

— Michael Crichton

189. “That is a transgenic animal. If he escapes he may transmit his genes to other parrots.”

— Michael Crichton

190. “They want to see their expectation... Entertainment has nothing to do reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

192. “Good novels are not written, they’re rewritten!”

— Michael Crichton

193. “Heisenberg uncertainty principle: that whatever you studied you also changed. In the end, it became clear that all scientists were participants in a participatory universe which did not allow anyone to be a mere observer.”

— Michael Crichton

194. “Multi-XMP? You mean more than one Cray?”

— Michael Crichton

195. “All heart surgeons are bastards, and Conway is no exception.”

— Michael Crichton

196. “Tim watched until he was sure the velociraptor was coming toward the kitchen. Was it following their scent? All the books said dinosaurs had a poor sense of smell, but this one seemed to do just fine. Anyway, what did books know? Here was the real thing.”

— Michael Crichton

197. “Terror can fill any space.”

— Michael Crichton

198. “Broadly speaking, the ability of the park to control the spread of life-forms. 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.”

— Michael Crichton

199. “In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity – our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees.”

— Michael Crichton

200. “Whoever has the power in society determines what can be studied, determines what can be observed, determines what can be thought.”

— Michael Crichton