Jurassic Park is a 1990 science fiction novel written by Michael Crichton. A cautionary tale about genetic engineering, it presents the collapse of a zoological park showcasing genetically recreated dinosaurs to illustrate the mathematical concept of chaos theory and its real-world implications.
Jurassic Park Book Quotes
1. “And I trust by now that you all know what the eventual outcome is going to be. You’re going to have to shut the thing down.”
2. “You ready to live dangerously?”
3. “There is absolutely no problem with the island.”
4. “We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens.”
5. “We have real dinosaurs out there now. That’s what people want to see.”
6. “If they don’t do it, someone else will.”
7. “So I wonder: have they learned, somewhere along the line, that humans are easy to kill?”
8. “Nothing as basic, or as serious, as the possibility of an animal escaping. Wu found it offensive to think that anyone would believe him capable of contributing to a system where such a thing could happen.”
9. “Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.”
10. “We haven’t re-created the past here. The past is gone. It can never be re-created. What we’ve done is reconstruct the past—or at least a version of the past. And I’m saying we can make a better version.”
11. “The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics… Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930?”
12. “Jurassic Park is not the real world. It is intended to be a controlled world that only imitates the natural world.”
13. “The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.”
14. “But what are you going to do to my animals?”
“That’s not really the question, Mr. Hammond… The question is, what are they going to do to us?”
15. “So we set out to make biological attractions. Living attractions. Attractions so astonishing they would capture the imagination of the entire world.”
16. “But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers at Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been.”
17. “Your doctor Wu does not even know the names of the things he is creating. He cannot be bothered with such details as what the thing is called, let alone what it is.”
18. “And, you remember our original intent was to use the emerging technology of genetic engineering to make money. A lot of money.”
19. “From a business standpoint, that makes helping mankind a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind.”
20. “She was amazed that it would come so close, but she remembered that this was a national park. All the animals in the park would know that they are protected.”