Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton , author

• Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
  • Caltech Michelin lecture, 2003 Jan 17[1]

• 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. [2]

Travels

• "I have included experiences in the realms that are sometimes called psychic, or transpersonal. or spiritual. I think of this as inner travel, to complement the outer travel, although that distinction--between what is internal sensation and what is external stimulus--often blurs in my mind."
  • Preface

• "The best doctors found a middle position where the 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."
• "The emotional aspect seemed more like hazing, like a professional initiation, than education. It was a long time before I understood that how a doctor behaved was at least important as what he knew."
  • "Cadaver"

• "We cause our diseases. We are directly responsible for any illness that happens to us."
• "To give up responsibility for our lives is not healthy."
• "The doctor is not a miracle worker who can magically save us but, rather, an expert adviser who can assist us in our own recovery."
  • "Heart Attack!"

• "The fact that the patients were complex human beings with a rich life beyond the hospital never really sank into the consciousness of the residents. Becuase they had no rich lives beyond the hospital, they assumed no one else did, either. In the end, what they lacked was not medical knowledge but ordinary life experience."
  • "Quitting Medicine"

• "What I knew was that the history of man demonstrated the inexorable triumph of reason over superstition, culminating in our acceptance of science as the best method for learning the truth and exploring the universe."
• "I was living in the most enlightened, the richest, the most advanced, the most liberated period in the history of man. And I knew that, despite fame, fortune, and psychiatry bills, I was miserable."
• "I read all sorts of books there for the first time. The other thing that I did was, I began to travel again."
  • "Psychiatry"

• "The entire episode left me with a renewed respect for the power of the unconscious mind. What I had demonstrated, to myself at least, was that my ordinary assumption that in some casual and automatic way I know what I am doing, and why, is simply wrong."
  • "Bonaire"

• "I couldn't leave things alone. I was an urban, technological man accustomed to making things happen. I had been taught countless times that you were supposed to make things happen, that anything less implied shameful passivity."
  • "Pahang"

• "This increased my conviction that there was indeed something going on, that these people had some information source that ordinary people did not. I didn't know why they had access and the rest of us did not, but there didn't seem to be any hocus-pocus about it."
• "I was certain that some people, whether by accident of birth or some pecularity of training, could tune in to another source of information and could know things about people we didn't think were possible to know."
  • "London Psychics"

• "Sometimes I think man needs to feel a special position within nature, and this leads him to believe that he is either specially hated by other animals or specially cherished. Instead of the truth, which is that he's just another animal on the plain. A smart one, but just another animal."
  • "Sharks"

• "I was jealous. Let's face it, to have a mystical experience is a sign of favor from God. Everybody knows that. And I wasn't getting any favors. It really made me feel bad."
• "If you stand beside a person who lies on his back, and move the palm of your hand slowly down the midline of his body about a foot above the skin, you will feel some distinct warm spots. These are the chakras ."
• "There isn't any delusion. It is absolutely clear that this body energy is a genuine phenomenon of some kind."
• "The basic mechanism of the I Ching had to be the same as the mechanism of the tarot --to provide an ambiguous stimulus to the unconscious mind."
• "The book doesn't have that power. You do. You can answer your own question. You already know the answer, if you can just gain access to it."
• "The purpose of the I Ching or the tarot, then, is to help you get access to yourself, by providing ambiguity for you to interpret."
  • "Cactus Teachings"

• "By now I had adopted David's view of the inherent differences between the sexes, that men were the romantics and women were the pragmatists. His view was that each sex saw the other as a projection of itself."
• "What's really wrong with making them the problem is that you abdicate your own responsibility. Once you say some mysterious they is in charge, then you're able to sit back comfortably and complain about how they are doing it."
• "The biggest problem between the sexes was the tendency to objectify the opposite sex and ultimately become powerless before them. Both men and women did this about the opposite sex. They were this way or that way. They had this tendency. There was nothing we could do about the way they behaved."
• "I had thought that women were inherently different from men. And in formulating that difference, I had also objectified women. They were different. They didn't have the same feelings I did. They were they."
  • "They"

• "Intermittent panicky skepticism was to be expected whenever you stepped off the cliff, whenever you went into some realm of experience that wasn't modeled and accepted and approved and stuck into a nice fram by society at large."
• "The kind of evidence I have seen for clairvoyance or telepathy--evidence that leads me to accept these phenomena as unquestionably real--I have not experienced for the idea of past lives."
  • "Life on the Astral Plane "

• "This seems to me to confirm the idea that so-called psychic or paranormal phenomena are misnamed. There's nothing abnormal about them. On the contrary, they're utterly normal. We've just forgotten we can do them. The minute we do do them, we recognize them for what they are and think, So what?"
  • "Spoon Bending"

• "When I got home, I looked at people to see if I could still see auras. I could. It's fun to do. When dinner parties get boring, you just look at people's auras ."
  • "Seeing Auras"

• "I had moved pretty far from the rational, academic, intellictual traditions in which I had been raised... So I decided to summarize the conclusions I had drawn from all these experiences."

1. "Consciousness has legitimate dimensions not yet guessed at."
2. "At least some psychic phenomena are real."
3. "There are energies associated with the human body that are not yet understood."

• "It's only different from what a certain variety of incautious, unintrospective physical scientist believes."
• "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."
• "The natural world, the traditional source of self-interest, is increasingly absent."
• "Cut off from direct experience, cut off from our own feelings and sometimes our own sensations, we are only too ready to adopt a viewpoint or perspective that is handed to us, and is not our own."
• "Unaccustomed to direct experience, we can come to fear it."
• "One of the most difficult features of direct experince is that it is unfiltered by any theories or expectations. It's hard to observe without imposing a theory to explain what we're seeing, but the trouble with theories, as Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed, but what can be observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories."
• "It takes enormous effort to avoid all theories and just see"
• "I believe the experiences reported in this book are reproducible by anyone who wishes to try."
• "Be cautious around anyone who creates proselytizing followers."
  • "Direct Experience"

• "Reality is always greater--much greater--than what we know, than whatever we can say about it."
• "Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something--reality--that may not be understood at all."
• "One may even suspect that there is more to reality than measurements will ever reveal."
• "Science can't tell you why anything happens."
• "Although knowledge of how things work is sufficient to allow manipulation of nature, what humans really want to know is why things work. Children don't ask how the sky is blue. They ask why the sky is blue."
  • "Postscript"