Michael Crichton Quotes

This is the rollcall of evolution happening in the space of a few generations, the greatest loss of living things that make up our biodiversity since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

We’re turning everything on the planet into food for humans so we’re cutting down the rainforests, displacing all of the animals, and we’re doing all this to feed humans... ... Imagine if there were only 2 billion people polluting? We’re already overpopulated. I feel we’ve become a parasite on this planet. If this population keeps growing, we’ll just keep devouring the planet, and I don’t think it’s going to stand for that very long.

I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.

I don’t know if it is all (man’s fault) but the majority is, for the most part, it is man who continuously slaps down nature.

It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet.

Left alone, human beings are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch.

There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.

Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not.

Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are termite hills left but no bush?

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.

Today, the tide has turned, we are destroying them.

Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There's no doubt in my heart.

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

Within hours of the impact, most of Mexico and the United States must have been reduced to a desolate wasteland of the most appalling, agonizing destruction. Where only the day before there had been fertile landscapes, full of animals and plants of all kinds, now there was a vast, smoldering netherworld, mercifully hidden from view by black clouds of roiling smoke.

We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.

The increasing desolation of nature, the exhaustion of resources, the uneasiness and disintegration of the human spirit, all have been brought about by humanity's trying to accomplish something.

Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?

Environmental degradation is one of the biggest challenges we have. I think a question that we're not asking ourselves is: 'Isn't humanity committing suicide with this indiscriminate and tyrannical use of nature?'

I will be very sad when global warming and toxins kill off all the toads and frogs and salamanders. Here's hoping we, as humans, figure out a way to be less stupid.

Throughout history, human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize-destroy-move on.

If we lose half the species, which could happen by the end of the century if we don't do anything, that's going to create a big difference down the line in the stability and even the economic potential in the living world. Irreversibly.

Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.