Quote

Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.

Michael Crichton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Crichton
Age: 66 †
Born: 1942
Born: October 23
Died: 2008
Died: November 4
Author
Basketball Player
Film Director
Film Producer
Medical Writer
Novelist
Physician Writer
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Chicago
Illinois
John Michael Crichton
Michael Douglas
Jeffery Hudson
John Lange
Discovered
Areas
Intellectual
Academia
Usually
Dignified
Theory
Wildly
Virtue
Embraced
Life
Speculation
Virtues

More quotes by Michael Crichton

Image
You can answer your own question. You already know the answer, if you can just gain access to it.
Michael Crichton
Image
I think every writer should have tattooed backwards on his forehead, like ambulance on ambulances, the words 'everybody needs an editor.
Michael Crichton
Image
To give up responsibility for our lives is not healthy.
Michael Crichton
Image
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.
Michael Crichton
Image
Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.
Michael Crichton
Image
The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
Michael Crichton
Image
Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other.
Michael Crichton
Image
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.
Michael Crichton
Image
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.
Michael Crichton
Image
...scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young...there is no mastery, old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature...Its a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are.
Michael Crichton
Image
One of the most difficult things for a writer in this business to accept is the uncertain fate of one's work.
Michael Crichton
Image
We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds - and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.
Michael Crichton
Image
In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better.
Michael Crichton
Image
I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.
Michael Crichton
Image
Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railroads, government, and police.
Michael Crichton
Image
Safety is the last refuge of the scoundrel!
Michael Crichton
Image
And that's how things are. 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 the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.
Michael Crichton
Image
Increasingly, people perceive no difference between the narcissistic self-serving reporters asking questions, and the narcissistic self-serving politicians who evade them.
Michael Crichton
Image
Geniuses never pay attention.
Michael Crichton
Image
They didn't understand what they were doing. I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.
Michael Crichton