Quotes from Michael Crichton

There are no pirates in Port Royal

Not at all. I find it liberating. I believe my life has value, and I don't want to waste it thinking about clothing

But as a professor who was popular with his students—and who advocated general education—Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

And Kelly was beginning to see that Sarah didn't let anything stop her, she just went and did it. This whole attitude of not letting other people stop you, of believing that you could do what you wanted, was something she found herself imitating.

The computer system is secure.

Everything on that island is perfectly fine.

Ian Malcolm, how do you do? I do maths." He

they nevertheless suggested that evolutionary pressures were moving the human race toward ever-greater conformity.

Sleep with your guns tonight, boys.

Eddie said, "What is this, a salamander convention?

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.

But free trade is meaningless unless there is also fair trade.

Perhaps the fact that we bleed to death makes us human.

the natural world had gone badly wrong. Everything that mankind is doing on the planet had upset the delicate balance of nature. The pollution, the rampant industrialization, the loss of habitat-when animals were squeezed and cornered, they behave viciously, in a desperate effort to survive.

It is an absurd expression of romantic hope.

Gee," Tim said, "I didn't know you had such personal feelings about it." "It should be accurate," Malcolm said. "You know, there is such a thing as accurate and inaccurate. Irrespective of whatever your feelings are.

Thorne's dislike of theory was legendary. 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.

It is living, breathing, walking, and talking. Only we cannot see it, because it is happening too slowly. Rock has a lifespan of three billion years. we have a lifespan of sixty or seventy years. And the rock 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.

You're lyin' in horseshit," Toad said. "Oh God, it's true.

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

The very concept of time travel makes no sense, since time doesn't flow. The fact that we think time passes is just an accident of our nervous systems—of the way things look to us. 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.

Like our padded cell? He poked the insulated walls. It's like living in a vagina.

The old ideas about survival of the fittest had gone out of fashion long ago. Those views were too simpleminded. Nineteenth-century thinkers saw evolution as 'nature red in tooth and claw,' envisioning a world where strong animals killed weaker ones. They didn't take into account that the weaker ones would inevitably get stronger, or fight back in some other way. Which of course they always do.

We are finding wonderful dinosaurs!' Exulted Cope. 'Wonderful, marvelous dinosaurs