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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 993f1d9 | These wafers had entered the mythology of the company, including their names: Tunguska, Vesuvius, Tokyo. The Vesuvius wafer put you on the Bay of Naples at 7:00 a.m. on August 24, A.D. 79, just before burning ash killed everyone. Tunguska left you in Siberia in 1908, just before the giant meteor struck, causing a shock wave that killed every living | Michael Crichton | ||
| 1b5e318 | And I think the answer is that we are, in reality, terribly frail animals. And we don't like to be reminded of how frail we are--how delicate the balances are inside our own bodies, how short our stay on Earth, and how easily it is ended. | humanity frailty | Michael Crichton | |
| af2c9b0 | 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. | Michael Crichton | ||
| a0ca566 | we haven't had any accidents for months now...Everything on that island is perfectly fine. | fiction humor jurassic-park | Michael Crichton | |
| e21ecb8 | 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. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 50949ce | 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." | Michael Crichton | ||
| 04c9433 | 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. | Michael Crichton | ||
| e727130 | The Thematic Apperception Test was a psychological test that consisted of a series of ambiguous pictures. Subjects were supposed to tell what they thought was happening in the pictures. Since no clear story was implied by the pictures, the subjects supplied the stories. And the stories told much more about the storytellers than about the pictures. | Michael Crichton | ||
| dd5252d | Chaos theory treats the behavior of a whole system like a drop of water moving on a complicated propeller surface. The drop may spiral down, or slip outward toward the edge. It may do many different things, depending. But it will always move along the surface of the propeller." "Okay." "Malcolm's models tend to have a ledge, or a sharp incline, where the drop of water will speed up greatly. He modestly calls this speeding-up movement the Ma.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| c21efaf | And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rainstorm we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old--the dream of total control--has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventu.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 612fb2b | Understanding is a delaying tactic. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 9108de4 | Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 780d7f9 | Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored. | Michael Crichton | ||
| ddcc367 | All right," Malcolm said. "Let's go back to the beginning." He paused, staring at the ceiling. "Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We've been doing it for h.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 1eb60cd | Chaos theory throws it right out the window. It says that you can never predict certain phenomena at all. You can never predict the weather more than a few days away. All the money that has been spent on long-range forecasting--about half a billion dollars in the last few decades--is money wasted. It's a fool's errand. It's as pointless as trying to turn lead into gold. We look back at the alchemists and laugh at what they were trying to do.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| ed80862 | 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" -- | Michael Crichton | ||
| bc6770f | 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." | Michael Crichton | ||
| 97cd1f1 | Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it's a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody .. | Michael Crichton | ||
| d820b41 | We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. | Michael Crichton | ||
| ec08697 | Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it's a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the en.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 7e945ce | Plants evolve like every other form of life, and they've come up with their own forms of aggression, defense, and so on. In the nineteenth century, most theories concerned animals--nature red in tooth and claw, all that. But now scientists are thinking about nature green in root and stem. We realize that plants, in their ceaseless struggle to survive, have evolved everything from complex symbiosis with other animals, to signaling mechanisms.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| aa5ba56 | And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media--it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benet.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 4c33291 | In evolutionary theory, this is called the Red Queen phenomenon," Malcolm said. "Because in Alice in Wonderland the Red Queen tells Alice she has to run as fast as she can just to stay where she is. That's the way evolutionary spirals seem. All the organisms are evolving at a furious pace just to stay in the same balance. To stay where they are." Arby said, "And this is common? Even with plants?" "Oh yes," Levine said. "In their own way, pl.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| a4e6740 | you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 24259ee | Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 6778bd4 | Malcolm coughed, and stared into the distance. "Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet--or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves." | Michael Crichton | ||
| 63802ed | The technician consulted the enclosed documents. "Lizard is biting local children. They have a question about identification of the species, and a concern about diseases transmitted from the bite." She produced a child's picture of a lizard, signed TINA at the top. "One of the kids drew a picture of the lizard." | Michael Crichton | ||
| d9bd824 | That's the greatest single scientific discovery of the twentieth century. You can't study anything without changing it." Since Galileo, scientists had adopted the view that they were objective observers of the natural world. That was implicit in every aspect of their behavior, even the way they wrote scientific papers, saying things like "It was observed ..." As if nobody had observed it. For three hundred years, that impersonal quality was.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 38b43de | 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. | Michael Crichton | ||
| cb7b16b | It isn't a matter of wanting it or not. It's a matter of what you think you can accomplish. When the hunter goes out in the rain forest to seek food for his family, does he expect co control nature? No. He imagines that nature is beyond him. Beyond his understanding. Beyond his control. Maybe he prays to nature, to the fertility of the forest that provides for him. He prays because he knows he doesn't control it. He's at the mercy of it. Bu.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 2ce7f4e | If there's anything worse than a limousine liberal," Morton said, "it's a Gulfstream environmentalist." | Michael Crichton | ||
| 269c408 | Life is too short, and DNA too long. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 94726f0 | They want to see their expectation... Entertainment has nothing to do reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality. | lies media | Michael Crichton | |
| 0c71dc1 | 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. | psychic-abilities | Michael Crichton | |
| 5cec8fa | Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is. Jean Anouilh, French dramatist and playwright | George Washington | ||
| c2998be | Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone, as a passion must be undergone. It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed when the right way is decided in advance, or when we impose what is right for everyone, without finding a way to enter into community and discover the "right" in the midst of cultural translation. It may be that what is "righ.. | feminism gender | Judith Butler | |
| 46159e6 | This utopian notion of a sexuality freed from heterosexual constructs, a sexuality beyond "sex", failed to acknowledge the ways in which power relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a "liberated" sexuality for women even within the terms of a "liberated" heterosexuality or lesbianism." | Judith Butler | ||
| d2d96a2 | Do you think yourself a string too short to save? Do you think that you are lank and straight, a linear bit with no connection fore or aft? Fear not your insignificance. Nature has a drawer for you. Yes, nature garners all the string too short to save, and mice visit that drawer. Here's nesting material! Yes, you will be interwoven, be it now or later. | Sena Jeter Naslund | ||
| 891f033 | I feel only sorrow that I have failed to please. Sorrow-and not resentment-for my mother says that resentment is the most readily visible of all the sinful emotions, but sorrow can enhance one's sweetness and appeal. Resentment, the empress says, is like a snake that nests in the bosom, and it can turn and strike her who harbors it. | Sena Jeter Naslund | ||
| a89ecc4 | You are my Easter. | Sena Jeter Naslund | ||
| 77be607 | Is beauty enhanced or adulterated by utility? | philosophy | Sena Jeter Naslund | |
| 628453a | What can we do with our stories,' he said, 'but tell them? | Sena Jeter Naslund | ||
| 1a9b603 | Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention. | humour funny life | Orson Scott Card | |
| de28b23 | All dreams. If there was love or pity for him, it was only in his dreams. | dreams | Orson Scott Card |