Michael Crichton Quotes - Page 6

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

All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you are there.

All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don't you take it away from yourself.

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.

Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.

Anyone who says he knows God's intention is showing a lot of very human ego.

Although knowledge of how things work is sufficient to allow manipulation of nature, what humans really want to know is why things work. Children don't ask how the sky is blue. They ask why the sky is blue.

Cut off from direct experience, cut off from our own feelings and sometimes our own sensations, we are only too ready to adopt a viewpoint or perspective that is handed to us, and is not our own.

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

Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can't be given away : it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline.

Do you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet.

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.

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.

You've never heard of Chaos theory? Non-linear equations? Strange attractors? Ms. Sattler, I refuse to believe you're not familiar with the concept of attraction.

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.

This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine.

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.

Morality must keep up with technology because if a person is faced with the choice of being moral and dead or immoral and alive, they'll choose life everytime.

Malcolm: A karate master does not kill people with his bare hands. He does not lose his temper and kill his wife. The person who kills is the person who has no discipline, no restraint, and who has purchased his power in the form of a Saturday night special. And that is why you think that to build a place like this is simple. Hammond: It was simple. Malcolm: Then why did it go wrong?

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

God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.

The best doctors found a middle position where they were neither overwhelmed by their feelings nor estranged from them. That was the most difficult position of all, and the precise balance - neither too detached nor too caring - was something few learned.

Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railroads, government, and police.

If you gamble long enough, you'll always lose -- the gambler is always ruined.

The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge.