Congo Quotes

“No one escapes from life alive.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“he saw every shade of green”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“give the project to whoever had the most to gain from success—or the most to lose from failure.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

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

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“(Among human beings, vocabulary was considered the best measure of intelligence.)”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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,”
― Michael Crichton, Congo