Michael Crichton Quotes

Technology itself is neither good nor bad. People are good or bad.

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.

The issues of the choice between right and wrong has to be an ongoing concern for everybody, at every age. There is no magical point in a human life when anyone is or becomes immune to the second-by-second choice to do right instead of wrong.

There are dangers, but only dangers if people don't understand where technology is taking us.

Beyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: How are we to choose between what we have been taught to think right and something else which manifestly succeeds?

In some countries the effort to debate and legislate the social and ethical implications of the new biological and genetic technologies often precedes their application. This observation confirms the realization by the public that biotechnological applications will interfere with all the basic and profound value systems considered by every human being

We cannot idealize technology. Technology is only and always the reflection of our own imagination, and its uses must be conditioned by our own values.

Technology challenges us to look at our human values. We can try to use technology to cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, which would be a blessing, but that blessing is not a reason to move from artificial brain enhancement to artificial intimacy.

Gee, I wish that life were so black and white that you can't think of a single person who, you know, a good person who has done bad things.

You on the cutting edge of technology have already made yesterday's impossibilities the commonplace realities of today.

Every generation’s breakthroughs are proven false by the next generation’s Technology

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

Should I be the one to play God? We're both about the same age, but we grew up in different neighborhoods.

Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral.

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

Evil, as evil, can never be chosen; and though evil is often the effect of our own choice, yet we never desire it but under the appearance of an imaginary good.

The tragedy is what - given the 'right circumstances,' - normal decent folks, like you and me, will do. This is what makes me worry whenever looking on the road that Israel entered and shows no intention of leaving.

When President Clinton starts talking about what is moral, as he did when recommending a national law banning human cloning, it's time for us to lock up our daughters.

The Human moral keyboard is limited ... there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine I was later to learn so hurriedly in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly

The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.