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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0698f88 | All major changes are like death," he said. "You can't see to the other side until you are there." And he closed his eyes." | Michael Crichton | ||
| d9a9dbc | Welcome to Jurassic Park. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 697e68e | 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." Hammond" | Michael Crichton | ||
| 814715f | this attempt to control ... We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old. They began at the time when Florence, Italy, was the most important city in the world. The basic idea of science--that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational--that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the .. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 72c561a | Elena rushed forward, screaming, and the lizards fled into the darkness. But long before she reached the bassinet, she could see what had happened to the infant's face, and she knew the child must be dead. The lizards scattered into the rainy night, chirping and squealing, leaving behind only bloody three-toed tracks, like birds. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 1d6dcc3 | I'm talking about all the order in the natural world," Malcolm said. "And how perhaps it can emerge fast, through crystallization. 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 be.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| ca65403 | 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'.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 9e61ed7 | You can make a boat, but you can't make the ocean. You can make an airplane, but you can't make the air. Your powers are much less than your dreams of reason would have you believe. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 96bbd27 | It's not 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 to 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. | Michael Crichton | ||
| c154197 | Wait," Lex said. "You're confusing it...." "Will you shut up! You don't know anything about computers!" | Michael Crichton | ||
| e93e5f5 | They can only live here in Jurassic Park. They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 77c012d | We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you 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. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 58dbe5a | They're both technicians. They don't have intelligence. They have what I call 'thintelligence.' They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it 'being focused.' They don't see the surround. They don't see the consequences. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 743eb9a | Multi-XMP? You mean more than one Cray? | Michael Crichton | ||
| 4a83f00 | Thirty thousand years ago; when men were doing cave paintings at Lascaux, they worked twenty hours a week to provide themselves with food and shelter and clothing. The rest of the time, they could play, or sleep, or do whatever they wanted. And they lived in a natural world, with clean air, clean water, beautiful trees and sunsets. Think about it. Twenty hours a week. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 136fb90 | En general, el promedio de vida de una especie era de cuatro millones de anos. En el caso de los mamiferos se reducia a un millon de anos. Transcurrido ese tiempo la especie desaparecia. | dinosaurios el-mundo-perdido ficcion jurassic-park michael-crichton the-lost-world | Michael Crichton | |
| ffb3750 | The Institute had explored the behavior of a great variety of complex systems--corporations in the marketplace, neurons in the human brain, enzyme cascades within a single cell, the group behavior of migratory birds--systems so complex that it had not been possible to study them before the advent of the computer. The research was new, and the findings were surprising. It did not take long before the scientists began to notice that complex s.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| f12afcb | The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can't control the climate. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 4033768 | Is this what happened to the dinosaurs? Is this the true cause of their disappearance? We may never know. But it is no accident that human beings are so interested in dinosaur extinction. The decline of the dinosaurs allowed mammals - including us - to flourish. And that leads us to wonder whether the disappearance of the dinosaur is going to be repeated, sooner or later, by us as well. Whether at the deepest level the fault lies not in bli.. | science | Michael Crichton | |
| e137c5a | Because, if you didn't know any physical chemistry, you could look at a crystal and ask all the same questions. You'd see those beautiful spars, those perfect geometric facets, and you could ask, What's controlling this process? How does the crystal end up so perfectly formed--and looking so much like other crystals? But it turns out a crystal is just the way molecular forces arrange themselves in solid form. No one controls it. It happens .. | Michael Crichton | ||
| f118d29 | After every major environmental change, a wave of extinctions has usually followed--but not right away. Extinctions only occur thousands, or millions of years later. Take the last glaciation in North America. The glaciers descended, the climate changed severely, but animals didn't die. Only after the glaciers receded, when you'd think things would go back to normal, did lots of species become extinct. That's when giraffes and tigers and mam.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 9335f4a | The episode related here is based on a true story. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 05e9d6a | Nature was not gentle or nice. There was no such thing as mercy in the natural world. You don't get any points for trying. You either survive or you don't. | Michael Crichton | ||
| a75629e | 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. | Michael Crichton | ||
| f2ad679 | Every human society expends tremendous time and energy teaching its children the right way to behave. You look at a simpler society, in the rain forest somewhere, and you find that every child is born into a network of adults responsible for helping to raise the child. Not only parents, but aunts and uncles and grandparents and tribal elders. Some teach the child to hunt or gather food or weave; some teach them about sex or war. But the res.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| e05cdb1 | 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 consens.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 638551b | Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. | Michael Crichton | ||
| a72a074 | The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 7eaa1d7 | 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 the 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. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 528a9a4 | But as a professor who was popular with his students--and who advocated general education--Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 9efd630 | It's just theories. Human beings can't help making them, but the fact is that theories are just fantasies. And they change. When America was a new country, people believed in something called phlogiston. You know what that is? No? Well, it doesn't matter, because it wasn't real anyway. They also believed that four humors controlled behavior. And they believed that the earth was only a few thousand years old. Now we believe the earth is four.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 94f4a14 | I wanted to marry wood. I wanted to chew down some two-by-fours, crawl inside a tree, slide elm into my aorta so that every beat of every second was a grand waltz with luck. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 27f0592 | I am going to host Thanksgiving myself and instead of a turkey I'm serving a big human butt. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 41c46e8 | The attitude of exclusive professionalism (which restricts the label of professionalism to the advisor) manifests itself in a number of dysfunctional ways. It reinforces a misleading belief that the advisor's job is to solve problems rather than to help the client solve problems. | David H. Maister | ||
| b5d5ddf | Sincerity, the way we usually mean it, has to do with intentions; we assume it comes from within. But our clients have no way to observe sincerity except through external behaviors. From certain behaviors (attention paid, interest shown, advance work done, empathetic listening), we infer the internal state we call sincerity. Thus, | David H. Maister | ||
| d91093f | Send meeting materials in advance | David H. Maister | ||
| 048ff4f | Reconfirm scheduled events before they happen. Announce changes to scheduled or committed dates as soon as they change. Intimacy | David H. Maister | ||
| 2e96f85 | It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it: That's what gets results. | David H. Maister | ||
| 7759948 | Reliability in this largely rational sense is the repeated experience of links between promises and action. | David H. Maister | ||
| f49df7a | I bit into the chocolate chip. Slowed myself down. By then, almost a week in, I could sort through the assault of layers a little more quickly. The chocolate chips were from a factory, so they had that same slight metallic, absent taste to them, and the butter had been pulled from cows in pens, so the richness was not as full. The eggs were tinged with a hint of far away and plastic. All of those parts hummed in the distance, and then the b.. | chocolate-chip-cookie factory-farming food-sensor ingredients layers | Aimee Bender | |
| 0174673 | On the drive home, she sat in the backseat, as she did on occasion. He said it was to protect her from more dangerous car accidents; she liked thinking for a moment that he was her chauffeur, that she had reached a state of adult richness where you did nothing for yourself anymore and returned to infancy. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 65938df | An American writer who had come to visit France . . . asked quite naturally what it was that had kept me here so long. . . It was useless to answer him in words. I suggested instead that we take a stroll through the streets. --HENRY MILLER ON LIVING IN PARIS | Elaine Sciolino | ||
| 04a1c09 | My part is not a heroic one, but I shall play my part. | creon france part-to-play ww2 | Jean Anouilh | |
| 91182ce | The garden was still asleep. I caught it unawares. A garden that hasn't yet begun to think about people. Beautiful. | Jean Anouilh |