Quotes from Michael Crichton

Unfortunately, the law has nothing to do with justice, Mr. Sanders," she said. "It's merely a method for dispute resolution.

ordinary Western urban man still clings to the belief that crime results from poverty, injustice, and poor education.

for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And

The Japanese have a saying: fix the problem, not the blame. In American organizations it's all about who fucked up. Whose head will roll. In Japanese organizations it's about what's fucked up, and how to fix it. Nobody gets blamed. Their way is better.

the truest picture of life in the past incorporated the interplay of all aspects of life, the good and the bad, the strong and the weak. It was no good pretending anything else.

Your business is not hardware. Your business is communications. Your business is access to information.

your eyes or changing the subject. You were forced to deal with that person's behavior. The experience was, in the end, a loss of certain illusions. The world was not how you wanted it to be. The world was how it was.

These Americans played with fire. Hydrogen bombs, megapower lasers, killer drones, shrunken micro-people…Americans were demon-raisers. Americans awakened technological demons they couldn't control, yet they seemed to enjoy the power.

Within the company, Dodgson presented himself as a researcher, even though he lacked the ability to do original research, and had never done any. His intellect was fundamentally derivative; he never conceived of anything until someone else had thought of it first. He was very good at "developing" research, which meant stealing someone else's work at an early stage. In this, he was without scruple and without peer.

A characteristic of all crises is their predictability, in retrospect. They seem to have a certain inevitability, they seem predestined.

if you don't understand something, you can't approximate it. You're really just guessing.

Each parasaur produced a large mound of straw-colored spoor. This was accompanied by low trumpeting from each animal in the herd—along with an enormous quantity of expelled flatus, redolent of methane.

Religion explains what man cannot explain. But when I see something before my eyes, and my religion hastens to assure me that I am mistaken, that I do not see it at all . . . No, I may no longer be a Quaker, after all.

The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion. Veteran reporter John Lawton, 68, speaking to the American Association of Broadcast Journalists in 1995

The episode related here is based on a true story.

You have to realize, all these decisions are about power. Sexual harassment is about power, and so is the company's resistance to dealing with it.

Of all the ways you can limit yourself, your own self-definition is the most powerful.

It was interesting that the compys only ate fresh dung

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.

You know you can't expect to observe the animals without changing anything. It's a scientific impossibility." "Of course it is," Malcolm said. "That's the greatest single scientific discovery of the twentieth century. You can't study anything without changing it.

But now reporters came to the story with the lead fixed in their minds; they saw their job as proving what they already knew. They didn't want information so much as evidence of villainy. In this mode, they were openly skeptical of your point of view, since they assumed you were just being evasive. They proceeded from a presumption of universal guilt, in an atmosphere of muted hostility and suspicion.

the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.

What advances?" Malcolm said irritably. "The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930?