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cef29ba
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Geniuses never pay attention.
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Michael Crichton |
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5eaabf5
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Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.
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Michael Crichton |
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f1ea590
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Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.
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science
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Michael Crichton |
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d867279
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Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science.
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Michael Crichton |
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998f499
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Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.
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jurassic-park
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Michael Crichton |
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1952040
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They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.' And?' Chaos theory throws it right out the window.
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Michael Crichton |
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0567fd6
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A man can see by starlight, if he takes the time.
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Michael Crichton |
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05f17a2
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The rock, for its part, 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.
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Michael Crichton |
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af0f06c
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Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.
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Michael Crichton |
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0c1d32b
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Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years - the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.
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Michael Crichton |
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8efa44d
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The purpose of history is to explain the present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power - profound power. The power to define a whole society.
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Michael Crichton |
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bd55dc0
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People were so naive about plants, Ellie thought. They just chose plants for appearance, as they would choose a picture for the wall. It never occurred to them that plants were actually living things, busily performing all the living functions of respiration, ingestion, excretion, reproduction---and defense.
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Michael Crichton |
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7c9bc54
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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.
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Michael Crichton |
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6d6e955
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Welcome...to Jurassic Park!
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Michael Crichton |
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9f59d65
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False fears are a plague, a modern plague!
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Michael Crichton |
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f5feda2
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He prays because he knows he doesn't control it. He's at the mercy of it.
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Michael Crichton |
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f11d867
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All human behavior has a reason. All behavior is solving a problem.
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Michael Crichton |
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84e8b29
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Kids didn't have huge backpacks when I was their age. We didn't have backpacks at all. Now it seemed all the kids had them. You saw little second-graders bent over like sherpas, dragging themselves through the school doors under the weight of their packs. Some of the kids had their packs on rollers, hauling them like luggage at the airport. I didn't understand any of this. The world was becoming digital; everything was smaller and lighter. ..
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kids
logic
school
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Michael Crichton |
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d44b321
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My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years in a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn't have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines...It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is *nothing*. A million years is *nothing*. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the hu..
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Michael Crichton |
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537d196
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Extrapolating from the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants.
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Michael Crichton |
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d2c0a33
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Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward--reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Pap..
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gell-mann-amnesia
media-bias
media
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Michael Crichton |
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164fed3
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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.
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Michael Crichton |
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88bc3e3
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Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. 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'..
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Michael Crichton |
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752953e
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Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.
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ian-malcolm
science
jurassic-park
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Michael Crichton |
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d91773b
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You are the reason why he exists on this earth. You don't have the right to abandon him just because he's inconvenient or has trouble in school.
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Michael Crichton |
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03a4216
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And entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.
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Michael Crichton |
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1c4fb07
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It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.
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Michael Crichton |
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faf00c3
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Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications.
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Michael Crichton |
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41ed9bc
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You would think that people who had experienced injustice would be loath to inflict it on others, and yet they do so with alacrity. The victims become victimizers with a chilling righteousness. This is the nature of fanaticism, to attract and provoke extremes of behavior. And this is why fanatics are all the same, whatever specific form their fanaticism takes.
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religion
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Michael Crichton |
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d87951c
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When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?
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Michael Crichton |
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2753ef5
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But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.
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Michael Crichton |
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dada7e9
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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.
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Michael Crichton |
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df7c462
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Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.
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Michael Crichton |
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c6f083b
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Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.
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Michael Crichton |
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adb44e6
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The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.
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Michael Crichton |
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524fd76
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For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.
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Michael Crichton |
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f232ace
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Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It's bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn thing off. That does it every time. Get my life back.
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television
reality
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Michael Crichton |
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dbac944
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We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.
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Michael Crichton |
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20b2687
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Expectation works in mysterious ways---and totally unconsciously.
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Michael Crichton |
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c4e65c2
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The ultimate lesson is that science isn't special - at least not anymore. Maybe back when Einstein talked to Niels Bohr, and there were only a few dozen important workers in every field. But there are now three million researchers in America. It's no longer a calling, it's a career. Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren't saints, they're human beings, and they do what human beings do - lie, cheat, s..
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Michael Crichton |
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e7ec064
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They always say they didn't. I never heard of one who said, 'You know, I deserve this.' Never happens.
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Michael Crichton |
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c93e0b2
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The fact that the biosphere responds unpredictably to our actions is not an argument for inaction. It is, however, a powerful argument for caution, and for adopting a tentative attitude toward all we believe, and all we do. Unfortunately, our species has demonstrated a striking lack of caution in the past. It is hard to imagine that we will behave differently in the future. We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We n..
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Michael Crichton |
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f83891e
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At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.
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survival
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Michael Crichton |
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9c81502
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Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way.
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Michael Crichton |