Michael Crichton Quotes
Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.
When I get sick, I go to my doctor like everyone else. A doctor has powerful tools that may help me. Or those tools may hurt me, make me worse. I have to decide. It's my life. It's my responsibility.
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.
Without question, the notion of the doctor as a legitimate fee-for-service entrepreneur, making his fortune from misfortunes of his patients, is old-fashioned, distasteful, and doomed.
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.
When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?
At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.
The rules of grammar exist in large part to permit readers and writers to operate from a shared set of expectations.
Caring is irrelevant. Desire to do good is irrelevant. All that counts is knowledge and results
Even if you don't believe in God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
In the information society, nobody thinks. We expect to banish paper, but we actually banish thought.
We cause our diseases. We are directly responsible for any illness that happens to us.
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.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it.
Scientific power is like inherited wealth; attained without discipline. You read about what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast.
In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right.
The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.
Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.
He prays because he knows he doesn't control it. He's at the mercy of it.
God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.
This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right.
Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.
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.
For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.
Nobody smart knows what they want to do until they get into their twenties or thirties.
Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications.
We need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
Environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s.
In a media-saturated world, persistent hype lends unwarranted credulity to the wildest claims.
Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science.
Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind.
All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you are there.
It's hard to decide who's truly brilliant; it's easier to see who's driven, which in the long run may be more important.
Do 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.