Michael Crichton
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.Collection: Children
In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.Collection: Results
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.Collection: Blind Spots
At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.Collection: Risk
The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.Collection: Spiritual
Face the facts, all these environmental organizations are thirty, forty, fifty years old. They have big buildings, big obligations, big staffs. They may trade on their youthful dreams, but the truth is, they're now part of the establishment. And the establishment works to preserve the status quo. It just does.Collection: Dream
A man can see by starlight, if he takes the time.Collection: Determination
To apply general tools to specific problems is to fail.Collection: Tools
Story of our species...everyone knows it's coming, but not so soon.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Real
Only assholes put a nickname on their business card.Collection: Cards
Discovery is always rape of the natural world. Always.Collection: Discovery
He prays because he knows he doesn't control it. He's at the mercy of it.Collection: Praying
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.Collection: Teaching
You can answer your own question. You already know the answer, if you can just gain access to it.Collection: Answers
You can't get decent Mexican food in DC.Collection: Mexican
She had been living like a hermit herself, in a cramped, seedy apartment in Somerville, spending long hours in the lab. All-nighters had become a regular thing. She didn't have any close friends, didn't go out on dates, didn't even go to the movies by herself. She had sacrificed a normal life in order to get a PhD, and become a scientist.Collection: Order
At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job.Collection: Jobs
Men under stress are fools, and fool themselves.Collection: Stress
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 consensus.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Self
In truth, one of our company, the solemn warrior Ecthgow, was so demented from liquor that he was drunk while still upon his horse, and he fell attempting to dismount. Now the horse kicked him in the head, and I feared for his safety, but Ecthgow laughed and kicked the horse back.Collection: Strength
Reality is always greater - much greater - than what we know, than whatever we can say about it.Collection: Life
Cure the symptoms, cure the disease.Collection: Cancer
Sneaking up on it sometimes helps: I've found I can be very productive for an hour before dinner, because there obviously isn't enough time to really do anything, so I can tell myself I'm just screwing around.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Creative
Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and instruments, but in the ened your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.Collection: Hard Work
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.Collection: Wise
This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.Collection: Fiction
As the practical value of altering consciousness becomes recognized, procedures to effect these alterations will become increasingly ordinary and unremarkable. The whole concept of changing states of consciousness will cease to have a threatening or exotic aspect.Collection: Ordinary
I think every writer should have tattooed backwards on his forehead, like ambulance on ambulances, the words 'everybody needs an editor.Collection: Thinking
Friendships are nice. So is competence.Collection: Nice
They always say they didn't. I never heard of one who said, 'You know, I deserve this.' Never happens.Collection: Said
Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am.Collection: World
If true computer music were ever written, it would only be listened to by other computers.Collection: Computer
Safety is the last refuge of the scoundrel!Collection: Safety
Science is the business of generating testable hypotheses.Collection: Hypothesis
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.Collection: Real
Nobody wants to feel they're not a rebel.Collection: Rebel
Nobody smart knows what they want to do until they get into their twenties or thirties.Collection: Smart
For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.Collection: Evolution
Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something ? reality ? that may not be understood at all.Collection: Reality
Expectation works in mysterious ways---and totally unconsciously.Collection: Expectations
We cause our diseases. We are directly responsible for any illness that happens to us.Collection: Disease
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.Collection: Philosophy
When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?Collection: Thinking