Quotes from Timeline — Michael Crichton
1942–2008 United States
← All quotes by Michael Crichton
6 quotes
Let’s not escape into mathematics. Let’s stay with reality.
Timeline (1999)
Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.
Timeline (1999)
What is the dominant motive experience at the end of the twentieth century? How do people see things, and how do they expect to see things? The answer is simple. In every field, from business to politics to marketing to education, the dominant mode has become entertainment.
Timeline (1999)
He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials—people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it.
Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored.
Timeline (1999)
The purpose of history is to explain the present—to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us why the things we value are the things we should value. And it tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power—profound power. The power to define a whole society.
Timeline (1999)
In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.
Timeline (1999)