Dragon Teeth Quotes

“You would think that people who had experienced injustice would be loath to inflict it on others, and yet they do so with alacrity. The victims become victimizers with a chilling righteousness. This is the nature of fanaticism, to attract and provoke extremes of behavior. And this is why fanatics are all the same, whatever specific form their fanaticism takes.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“You must first learn patience, if you wish to learn anything at all.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“Photographs provided a tangible reality to men who were far from home, fearful and tired; they were posed proofs of success, souvenirs to send to sweethearts and loved ones, or simply ways of remembering, of grasping a moment in a swift changing and uncertain world.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“They want the Indians eliminated, and the lands opened up to white settlers, but they don't want anybody to get hurt in the process. That just ain't possible.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“You would think that people who had experienced injustice would be loath to inflict it on others, and yet they do so with alacrity. The victims become the victimizers with a chilling righteousness. This is the nature of fanaticism, to attract and provoke extremes of behavior. And this is why fanatics are all the same, whatever specific form their fanaticism takes.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“After all, the trouble with what the scientists said was that they were always saying something different. This year one idea, next year something else. Scientific opinion was ever changing, like the fashions of women’s dress, while the firm and fixed date 4004 BC invited the attention of those seeking greater verity.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“Photographs provided a tangible reality to men who were far from home, fearful and tired; they were posed proofs of success, souvenirs to send to sweethearts and loved ones, or simply ways of remembering, of grasping a moment in a swiftly changing and uncertain world. His”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“it was "the hardest damn thing I ever did in my life. I don't care how many feathers a man wears in his hair, he's still a man. One of them, Red Legs, looked at me and said 'do you think this is fair? Would you sign such a paper?' and I could not meet his eyes. It made me sick.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“Unless he finds a purpose to his life, he risks unseemly decline into indolence and vice.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“We are finding wonderful dinosaurs!’ Exulted Cope. ‘Wonderful, marvelous dinosaurs”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“You’re lyin’ in horseshit,” Toad said. “Oh God, it’s true.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“Religion explains what man cannot explain. But when I see something before my eyes, and my religion hastens to assure me that I am mistaken, that I do not see it at all . . . No, I may no longer be a Quaker, after all.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“There is no greater pleasure than to win what everyone desires”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“Sleep with your guns tonight, boys.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“I am most heartily glad that I am not going to the dangerous and uncertain Black Hills.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“Meanwhile the antelope was butchered, and the flesh was found to be crawling with maggoty parasites. Cookie announced he had eaten worse, but they decided on a meal of biscuits and beans instead. Johnson recorded that "I am already thoroughly sick of beans, with six more weeks of them still before me." But it was not all bad.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“Here were rugged men, painted women, border ruffians, pickpockets, soldiers, crying children, food vendors, barking dogs, thieves, grandparents, gunfighters—a great confused mass of humanity,”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“lawyers—“What do I care for the law? Haint I got the power?”—had made him a legend.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“I don’t know,” Cope said. “But I do not see how one can believe that dinosaurs evolved, and reptiles evolved, and mammals such as the horse evolved, but that man sprang fully developed without antecedents.” “Aren’t you a Quaker, Professor Cope?” Cope’s ideas were still unacceptable to most faiths, including the Religious Society of Friends, which was the Quakers’ formal name. “I may not be,” Cope said. “Religion explains what man cannot explain. But when I see something before my eyes, and my religion hastens to assure me that I am mistaken, that I do not see it at all . . . No, I may no longer be a Quaker, after all.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“No man can say he loves us, when he wantonly destroys our work; no man loves God who wantonly destroys his creatures.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“You would think that people who had experienced injustice would be loath to inflict it on others, and yet they do so with alacrity. The victims become the victimizers with a chilling righteousness. This is the nature of fanaticism, to attract and provoke extremes”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“The victims become the victimizers with a chilling righteousness. This is the nature of fanaticism, to attract and provoke extremes of behavior. And this is why fanatics are all the same,”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“This was certainly still so in 1876. Much earlier in the century, Thomas Jefferson had carefully concealed his own view that fossils represented extinct creatures. In Jefferson’s day, public espousal of belief in extinction was considered heresy.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“Back in July 1806, William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, explored the south bank of the Yellowstone River, in what would later become Montana Territory, and found a fossil “semented [sic] within the face of the rock.” He described it as a bone three inches in circumference and three feet in length, and considered it the rib of a fish, although it was probably a dinosaur bone. More dinosaur bones were found in Connecticut in 1818; they were believed to be the remains of human beings; dinosaur footprints, discovered in the same region, were described as the tracks of “Noah’s raven.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“Any discovery led Cope to wax philosophical around the campfire at night. Each man had examined the teeth, felt their ridges and knobs, weighed their heft in one hand. The discovery of the gigantic Brontosaurus provoked an unusual degree of speculation. “There are so many things in nature we would never imagine,” Cope said. “At the time of this Brontosaurus, the glacial ice had receded and our entire planet was tropical. There were fig trees in Greenland, palm trees in Alaska. The vast plains of America were then vast lakes, and where we are sitting now was at the bottom of a lake. The animals we find were preserved because they died and sank to the bottom of the lake, where muddy sediment silted over them, and that sediment in turn compressed into rock. But who would have conceived such things until the evidence for them was found?” No one spoke. They stared at the crackling fire.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“And Sternberg had been right: in the end, the worst thing about the badlands was the dust. Harshly alkaline, it billowed up with every stab of pick and shovel; it burned the eyes, stung the nose, caked the mouth, caused coughing spasms; it burned in open cuts; it covered clothes and chafed at elbows and armpits and backs of knees; it gritted in sleeping bags; it dusted food, sour and bitter, and flavored coffee; stirred by the wind, it became a constant force, a signature of this harsh and forbidding place.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth: A Novel

“Look boy’ Wyatt said. ‘I know you’re from back east, but nobody’s that stupid”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“They were making scientific history”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“She laughed, and he saw one of her front teeth was chipped. This little imperfection only made him love her more”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“The Indians think these fossils are the bones of serpents, which is to say reptiles. We think they were reptiles, too. They think these creatures were gigantic. So do we. They think these gigantic reptiles lived in the distant past. So do we. They think the Great Spirit killed them. We say we don’t know why they disappeared—but since we offer no explanation of our own, how can we be sure theirs is superstition?”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth