Quotes from Michael Crichton

The kids were probably with Grant. And if Grant was out in the park, well Ã¢â'¬Â¦ what better person to get them safely through Jurassic Park than a dinosaur expert?

You can't get decent Mexican food in DC.

In the eyes of all of them was the hollow stare of fear, and there was hollowness in their merriment, too.

People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity-our most necessary resourse?

All heart surgeons are bastards, and Conway is no exception.

Whoever you are, some evening take a step out of your house, which you know so well. Enormous space is near.

The truth was, the more he got portrayed as an unprincipled, ruthless prick, the more clients flocked to him. Because when it came to divorce, people wanted a ruthless prick. They lined up for one.

Wu shrugged. "So? Just reset: shut the system down and you'll clear memory." "I've never done it before," Arnold said. "And I'm reluctant to do it. Maybe

I often hear skeptics say that, if psychic behavior was real, the psychics would be playing the stock markets or the ponies. In my experience, many of them do. There is, in fact, a kind of secret level of activity in which psychics consult to major corporations and businesses. People seem embarrassed to admit this activity but it takes place, just as you'd expect it to.

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.

All the deep-diving studies show that women are superior for submerged operations. They're physically smaller and consume less nutrients and air, they have better social skills and tolerate close quarters better, and they are physiologically tougher and have better endurance.

As the practical value of altering consciousness becomes recognized, procedures to effect these alterations will become increasingly ordinary and unremarkable. The whole concept of changing states of consciousness will cease to have a threatening or exotic aspect.

Inevitably, underlying instabilities begin to appear.

A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there...And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.

How can you design for people if you don't know history and psychology? You can't. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up.

It's marked as an object," Wu said. In computer terminology, an "object" was a block of code that could be moved around and used, the way you might move a chair in a room.

Universities are no longer the intellectual centers of the country. The very idea is preposterous. Universities are the backwater. Don't look so surprised. I'm not saying anything you don't know. Since World War II, all the really important discoveries have come out of private laboratories.

The biggest cause of environmental destruction is poverty. Starving people can't worry about pollution. They worry about food. Half

The world was not how you wanted it to be. The world was how it was.

A third reason scientists are reluctant to examine paranormal phenomena is that they appear to contradict known physical laws. What is the point of studying the impossible? Only a fool would waste his time. The problem of data in conflict with existing theory cannot be overstated. Arthur Eddington once said you should never believe any experiment until it has been confirmed by theory, but this humorous view has a reality that cannot be discounted.

But as Alston Chase put it, "when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.

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.

I suspect everybody has a degree of psychic ability, just as a everybody has a degree of athletic or artistic ability. Some people have special gifts; other people have a particular interest that leads them to develop their abilities. But the phenomenon itself is ordinary and widespread.

You know what's wrong with scientific power?" Malcolm said. "It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are. It never fails.