Michael Crichton Quotes - Page 2

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

Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

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.

The risk is too great. A man cannot place too much faith in any one thing, neither a woman, nor a horse, nor a weapon, nor any single thing.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

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?

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.

Each person bears a fear which is special to him. One man fears a close space and another man fears drowning; each laughs at the other and calls him stupid. Thus fear is only a preference, to be counted the same as the preference for one woman or another, or mutton for pig, or cabbage for onion.

My own sense is that the acquisition of self knowledge has been made difficult by the modern world. More and more human beings live in vast urban environments, surrounded by other human beings and the creations of human beings. The natural world, the traditional source of self-awareness, is increasingly absent.

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.

This, in essence, is the problem with the scientific view of reality. Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something - reality - that may not be understood at all.

There are lots of trips out there. It's even possible to become a conference groupie, going from one seminar to another and being a Beautiful Evolved Human Being until you start making the people around you want to throw up.

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.

They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners.

...we haven't had any accidents for months now...Everything on that island is perfectly fine.

Geniuses never pay attention.

All human behavior has a reason. All behavior is solving a problem.

Expectation works in mysterious ways-and totally unconsciously.