Top 300 Michael Crichton Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

202. “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

203. “They are focused on whether they can do something. They never think whether they should do something.”

— Michael Crichton

204. “Geniuses never pay attention.”

— Michael Crichton

205. “Power is neither male or female.”

— Michael Crichton

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Michael Crichton

209. “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

210. “But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers of Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been.”

— Michael Crichton

211. “Save the Earth” and beneath that, “There’s Nowhere Else to Go.”

— Michael Crichton

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

— Michael Crichton

213. “We spared no expense.”

— Michael Crichton

214. “The work of the late Heinz Pagels provoked Ian Malcolm.”

— Michael Crichton

215. “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.”

— Michael Crichton

216. “In the 1980s, a few genetic engineering companies began to ask, “What is the biological equivalent of a Sony Walkman?” These.”

— Michael Crichton

217. “People aren’t studying the natural world any more, they’re mining it. It’s a looter mentality. Anything new or unknown is automatically of interest, because it might have value. It might be worth a fortune.”

— Michael Crichton

218. “Reality is always greater – much greater – than what we know, than whatever we can say about it.”

— Michael Crichton

219. “They always say they didn’t. I never heard of one who said, ‘You know, I deserve this.’ Never happens.”

— Michael Crichton

220. “As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.”

— Michael Crichton

221. “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. – MARK TWAIN.”

— Michael Crichton

222. “In his view, a theory was nothing more than a substitute for experience put forth by someone who didn’t know what he was talking about.”

— Michael Crichton

223. “Extrapolating from the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants.”

— Michael Crichton

224. “Science can’t tell you why anything happens.”

— Michael Crichton

225. “They just posture and pontificate. Nobody tests. Nobody does field research. 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.”

— Michael Crichton

226. “He did not want an affair with his boss. He did not even want a one-night stand. Because what always happened was that people found out, gossip at the water cooler, meaningful looks in the hallway. And sooner or later the spouses found out. It always happened. Slammed doors, divorce lawyers, child custody.”

— Michael Crichton

227. “You want a university appointment?” “Yes.” “That’s a mistake,” Hammond said briskly. “At least, if you respect your talent.” Wu had blinked. “Why?” “Because, let’s face facts,” Hammond said. “Universities are no longer the intellectual centers of the country. The very idea is preposterous. Universities are the backwater. Don’t look so surprised.”

— Michael Crichton

228. “People aren’t studying the natural world any more, they’re mining it.”

— Michael Crichton

229. “Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored.”

— Michael Crichton

230. “After all, the trouble with what the scientists said was that they were always saying something different. This year one idea, next year something else. Scientific opinion was ever changing, like the fashions of women’s dress, while the firm and fixed date 4004 BC invited the attention of those seeking greater verity.”

— Michael Crichton

231. “All the deep-diving studies show that women are superior for submerged operations. They’re physically smaller and consume less nutrients and air, they have better social skills and tolerate close quarters better, and they are physiologically tougher and have better endurance.”

— Michael Crichton

232. “And in that moment, their situation was clear to him. Their guides were both dead. One machine was gone. Their return marker was shattered. Which meant they were stuck in this place. Trapped here, without guides or assistance. And with no prospect of ever getting back. Not ever.”

— Michael Crichton

233. “Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience.”

— Michael Crichton

234. “Personally, I don’t deal much in theory. I have to deal with the facts. And on the basis of facts, I don’t see much difference in the behavior of men and women.”

— Michael Crichton

235. “It seemed to him that a society in which the most common prescription drug was Valium was, by definition, a society with unsolved problems.”

— Michael Crichton

236. “Parrots can definitely reason symbolically.”

— Michael Crichton

237. “These kids were smart, they were enthusiastic, and they were young enough so that the schools hadn’t destroyed all their interest in learning. They could still actually use their brains, which in Thorne’s view was a sure sign they hadn’t yet completed a formal education.”

— Michael Crichton

238. “Herger said to me, “Be thankful, for you are fortunate.” I inquired the source of my fortune. Herger said in reply, “If you have the fear of high places, than this day you shall overcome it; and so you shall have faced a great challenge; and so you shall be adjudged a hero.”

— Michael Crichton

239. “Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything – evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing – it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.”

— Michael Crichton

240. “And because you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can accomplish something quickly.”

— Michael Crichton

241. “In the modern world, it’s a much more serious transgression to shoot a tiger than to shoot your parents. Tigers have advocates.”

— Michael Crichton

242. “One may even suspect that there is more to reality than measurements will ever reveal.”

— Michael Crichton

243. “In general, people who aren’t in touch with their emotions tend to think their emotions are unimportant.”

— Michael Crichton

244. “And to imagine all these things happen purely by chance is like imagining that a tornado can hit a junkyard and assemble the parts into a working 747 airplane. It’s very hard to believe.”

— Michael Crichton

245. “Or maybe they’re weird. Maybe dinosaurs are weird.”

— Michael Crichton

246. “You have done the work of a mere man,” the tengol continued, “and not a proper hero. A hero does what no man dares to undertake.”

— Michael Crichton

247. “But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost – they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.”

— Michael Crichton

248. “Yet I have discovered that if all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief...”

— Michael Crichton

249. “Theories are just fantasies. And they change.”

— Michael Crichton

250. “They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners.”

— Michael Crichton