Michael Crichton Congo Quotes

No one escapes from life alive.

The purpose of life is to stay alive. Watch any animal in nature--all it tries to do is stay alive. It doesn't care about beliefs or philosophy. Whenever any animal's behavior puts it out of touch with the realities of its existence, it becomes exinct.

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.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

His management philosophy, tempered in his rain-dancing days, was always to give the project to whoever had the most to gain from success--or the most to lose from failure.

Today we are surrounded by man and his creations. Man is inescapable, everywhere on the globe, and nature is a fantasy, a dream of the past, long gone.

I would characterize Moonlit Nights as a mix between Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's 'The Relic' and 'Congo' by Michael Crichton. If those books had a baby and that baby was a werewolf then that would be my book!

(Among human beings, vocabulary was considered the best measure of intelligence.)

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.

To enter a truly natural world was exotic, beyond the experience of most mankind, who lived from birth to death in entirely man-made circumstances.

But an animal in a zoo or a game park does not live its natural life, any more than a man in a city lives a natural life. Today we are surrounded by man and his creations. Man is inescapable, everywhere on the globe, and nature is a fantasy, a dream of the past, long gone.

Comparison to older manufacturing technologies makes this clear. Detroit was content to make trivial product design changes at three-year intervals, but the electronics industry routinely expected order of magnitude advances in the same time. (To keep pace, Detroit would have had to increase automobile gas mileage from 8 miles per gallon in 1970 to 80,000,000 miles per gallon in 1979. Instead, Detroit went from 8 to 16 miles per gallon during that time, further evidence of the coming demise of the automotive industry as the center of the American economy.

Five years. Do you know what that means?” Ross knew what it meant. In an industry where competitive edges were measured in months, companies had made fortunes by beating competitors by a matter of weeks with some new techniques or device; Syntel in California had been the first to make a 256K memory chip while everyone else was still making 16K chips and dreaming of 64K chips. Syntel kept their advantage for only sixteen weeks, but realized a profit of more than a hundred and thirty million dollars.

The Kigani believed that magic also resided in the bodies of their adversaries, and so to overcome spells cast by other Angawa they ate the bodies of their enemies. The magical power invested in the enemy thus became their own, frustrating enemy sorcerers. These beliefs were very old, and the Kigani had long since settled on a pattern of response to threat, which was to eat other human beings.

The twentieth-century world did not accommodate man-eating beliefs; indeed, the government in Kinshasa, two thousand miles away, had already decided to “expunge the embarrassment” of cannibals within its borders

The purpose of life,” Munro said, “is to stay alive. Watch any animal in nature—all it tries to do is stay alive. It doesn’t care about beliefs or philosophy. Whenever any animal’s behavior puts it out of touch with the realities of its existence, it becomes extinct

give the project to whoever had the most to gain from success—or the most to lose from failure.

And when Arthur was twice asked to sort photographs of people and photographs of chimps, he sorted them correctly except that both times he put his own picture in the stack with the people. He obviously did not consider himself a chimpanzee,

Elliot was accused of being a “Nazi criminal” engaged in the “torture of dumb [sic] animals.

She got all her exercise vicariously, like when traveling the Congo with Michael Crichton, chasing bad guys with Harlan Coben, going to battle with Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, or escaping from prison with the Count of Monte Cristo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Crichton’s novels include The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Congo, Jurassic Park, Rising Sun, Disclosure, and The Lost World. He was also the creator of the television series ER. Crichton died in 2008.

he saw every shade of green

Not in this case,” Morton said, “but sooner or later it will. You watch: within ten years, there will be a custody case involving a language-using primate, and the ape will be in the witness-box.

Travis had managed to keep a sense of humor after a decade of high-tech problems; his management philosophy was summarized by a large sign mounted behind his desk, which read “S.D.T.A.G.W.” It stood for “Some Damn Thing Always Goes Wrong.

There is a wild card in the formulation of an answer to this conundrum: In some deep and unexplained way, the realm of the ancient is tied to our notions of an amorphously envisioned postmodern future. For those who require a larger context to see this process in action, the outlines of this shadow-puzzle are evident in contemporary literature. In Michael Crichton’s novel Congo, images of high technology subtly resonate with images of our primal ancestry. In the movie 2001, based on the science-fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke, the image of the mysterious monolith is juxtaposed against landscapes familiar only to our primitive forebears.