Michael Crichton Quotes

One cannot guarantee that if we have good intelligence, good policy will necessarily follow. But we can guarantee that if we have poor intelligence, poor policy will necessarily follow.

As an intelligence analyst you have to tell the president what you know, what you think you know and what you don’t know.

All through my life, when faced with a difficult decision, I always ask myself - where can I learn more. Make the choice to learn.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

I'm not too worried about that. I am a big believer in modeling.

In the early days, I promoted the idea of spending time in libraries to gain facts that other investors didn't have. Not many people did that kind of research, so it worked.

To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance.

I really enjoy researching, and for almost every piece, I research enough to write a book.

The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means.

All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guess what was at the other side of the hill'.

Good data is hard to find. Hard data is good to find.

One cannot always be right in our complex world; no dishonor attends an incorrect choice among plausible outcomes drawn from a properly constructed argument.

If we have as a clear certainty with which to plan, total uncertainty, then that would be helpful.

The statesman must weigh the rewards of success against the penalties of failure. And he is permitted only one guess.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

Life's most important questions are, for the most part, nothing but probability problems.

Good policy analysis recognizes that physical truth may be poorly or incompletely known. Its objective is to evaluate, order, and structure incomplete knowledge so as to allow decisions to be made with as complete an understanding as possible of the current state of knowledge, its limitations, and its implications.

Let us gather facts in order to get ourselves thinking.

If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right. If you don't get all the facts, it can't be right.

In many important contexts, especially those that are complex, new, or unfamiliar, you shouldn’t blink… and you really shouldn’t trust your gut.

When a government faces an evil that might be avoided, the usual pattern is to first debate whether or not the evil is real or imagined; then determine how evil it really is; then is it an appropriate function of government to avoid it? Then what are the alternative ways to avoid it? Then what are the costs to avoid it? And finally, is the benefit of avoiding the evil worth the cost? In those cases where it is, it is by this time too late to avoid the evil and discussions shift to ameliorating the evil.

The great problem now is that we don’t know what to do.

The pressure of time, is the overwhelming challenge for policymakers who must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time and whose mistakes are irretrievable.

I'm a research queen.

I can't ever remember being struck by lightning when making a big decision. It's always about taking in more and more data points and making tack adjustments as you figure it out. I call customers, suppliers, industry analysts and try to get as much information as possible.