Top 300 Michael Crichton Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

154. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

160. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

163. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

165. “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

166. “If there’s anything worse than a limousine liberal,” Morton said, “it’s a Gulfstream environmentalist.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

173. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

181. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “Terror can fill any space.”

— Michael Crichton

188. “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

189. “Power is neither male or female.”

— Michael Crichton

190. “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

191. “People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with animals – discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others; and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

193. “A crisis is made by men, who enter into the crisis with their own prejudices, propensities, and predispositions. A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored.”

— Michael Crichton

194. “To apply general tools to specific problems is to fail.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

196. “But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is.”

— Michael Crichton

197. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

198. “You can make a boat, but you can’t make the ocean. You can make an airplane, but you can’t make the air. Your powers are much less than your dreams of reason would have you believe.”

— Michael Crichton

199. “Geniuses never pay attention.”

— Michael Crichton

200. “Nobody wants to feel they’re not a rebel.”

— Michael Crichton