Quotes from Michael Crichton

There's nothing more sobering than a thirty year old newspaper.

He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials—people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it.

In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused

Hunter recognized the old seaman's trick for locating the eye of a hurricane. If you stood with your arms out and your back to the wind, the eye of the storm was always two points forward of the left hand's direction.

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.

But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things.

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

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds—and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.

Yet there was also widespread public complacency, for the fundamental assumption of Victorians was that progress—progress in the sense of better conditions for all mankind—was inevitable.

Personally, I would never help mankind.

They were seduced by their own technology.

My point is, there is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us. Before

And when Arthur was twice asked to sort photographs of people and photographs of chimps, he sorted them correctly except that both times he put his own picture in the stack with the people. He obviously did not consider himself a chimpanzee

Wu was lying on his back, his body already torn open by the big claw, and the raptor was jerking its head, tugging at Wu's intestines even though Wu was still alive, still feebly reaching up with his hands to push the big head away, he was being eaten while he was still alive

The Indians think these fossils are the bones of serpents, which is to say reptiles. We think they were reptiles, too. They think these creatures were gigantic. So do we. They think these gigantic reptiles lived in the distant past. So do we. They think the Great Spirit killed them. We say we don't know why they disappeared—but since we offer no explanation of our own, how can we be sure theirs is superstition?

Young Johnson Joins the Field Trip West

They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything

Sanders had fought the B-school mentality that she exemplified. After watching these graduates come and go, Sanders had finally concluded that there was a fundamental flaw in their education. They had been trained to believe that they were equipped to manage anything. But there was no such thing as general managerial skill and tools.

He often argued that human intelligence was more trouble than it was worth. It was more destructive than creative, more confusing than revealing, more discouraging than satisfying, more spiteful than charitable

This is precisely the kind of critical turnabout that has always frustrated and infuriated architects. No less a figure than Sir Christopher Wren, writing tow hundred years earlier, complained that the peoples of London may despise some eyesore until it is demolished, whereupon by magick the replacement is deemed inferior to the former edifice, now eulogized in high and glowing reference.

The exploitations he had found so profitable he now attacked with the money he had made from them. He

Now King had all the accoutrements of success: a Porsche, a mortgage, a divorce, a kid he saw on weekends.

am saying their religion has made a state that does not halt injustice, but rather institutionalizes it. They feel superior to others who have different beliefs. They feel only they possess the right way.

There are many people, including myself, who are quite queasy about the consequences of this technology for the future. —K. Eric Drexler, 1992