State of Fear Quotes

“Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“False fears are a plague, a modern plague!”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Even if you don’t believe in any 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.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Expectation works in mysterious ways---and totally unconsciously.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“I have more respect for people who change their views after acquiring new information than for those who cling to views they held thirty years ago. The world changes. Ideologues and zealots don’t.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Like all trial attorneys, he knew the importance of not dressing too well.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Sometimes I think everyone's an attorney.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“You can't get decent Mexican food in DC.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler,”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“The world was not how you wanted it to be. The world was how it was.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“But as Alston Chase put it, “when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“The biggest cause of environmental destruction is poverty. Starving people can’t worry about pollution. They worry about food. Half”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“If there’s anything worse than a limousine liberal,” Morton said, “it’s a Gulfstream environmentalist.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions. Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences. Once”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Once again, vague terminology helped conceal what was really going on.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“They just posture and pontificate. Nobody tests. Nobody does field research. 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.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“G.K. Chesterton said (in a somewhat different context), “If you believe in nothing, you’ll believe in anything.” That”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban,”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“La actual preocupación casi histérica por la seguridad es en el mejor de los casos un derroche de recursos y un obstáculo para el espíritu humano, y en el peor de los casos una invitación al totalitarismo. Se necesita con urgencia educación pública.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done. And if they are smart, they’ll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly. This is not a good system for research into those areas of science that affect policy. Even worse, the system works against problem solving. Because if you solve a problem, your funding ends. All that’s got to change.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear