Michael Crichton Quotes
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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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The best doctors found a middle position where they were neither overwhelmed by their feelings nor estranged from them. That was the most difficult position of all, and the precise balance - neither too detached nor too caring - was something few learned.
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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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There is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us.
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One may even suspect that there is more to reality than measurements will ever reveal.
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The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
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The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.
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There isn't any delusion. It is absolutely clear that this body energy is a genuine phenomenon of some kind.
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The people in Hollywood are fabulously stupid.
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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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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.
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False fears are a plague, a modern plague!
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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.
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I hadn't traveled with the intention of learning about anything except myself. And the real point of all this travel was not what I had come to believe or disbelieve about the wider world, but what I had learned about myself.
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The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief.
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To give up responsibility for our lives is not healthy.
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I want a news service that tells me what no one knows but is true nonetheless.
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It's better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear.
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In my view, our approach to global warming exemplifies everything that is wrong with our approach to the environment. We are basing our decisions on speculation, not evidence. Proponents are pressing their views with more PR than scientific data. Indeed, we have allowed the whole issue to be politicized-red vs blue, Republican vs Democrat. This is in my view absurd. Data aren't political. Data are data. Politics leads you in the direction of a belief. Data, if you follow them, lead you to truth.
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Environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s.
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Each person bears a fear which is special to him. One man fears a close space and another man fears drowning; each laughs at the other and calls him stupid. Thus fear is only a preference, to be counted the same as the preference for one woman or another, or mutton for pig, or cabbage for onion.
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Nobody wants to feel they're not a rebel.
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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.
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We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.
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They didn't understand what they were doing. I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.
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The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world" of our past. That hope is science.
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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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Men under stress are fools, and fool themselves.
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All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you are there.
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God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.
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