Best Congo Quotes by Michael Crichton

"Only prejudice, and a trick of the Mercator projection, prevents us from recognizing the enormity of the African continent."

"Africa is called the Dark Continent for one reason only: the vast equatorial rain forests of its central region."

"This primeval forest has stood, unchanged and unchallenged, for more than sixty million years."

"The great expanse of the forest remains inviolate, and to this day thousands of square miles are still unexplored."

"Stanley was not in Africa to reform the people nor to build an empire, and he was not impelled by any real interest in such matters as anthropology, botany or geology. To put it bluntly, he was out to make a name for himself."

"By 1885, one American said that Leopold 'possesses the Congo just as Rockefeller possesses Standard Oil.'"

"The race to make 'the most important discovery of the 1980s' in the Congo took place during six weeks of 1979."

"The basic impression was of a vast, oversized, gray-green world—an alien place, inhospitable to man."

"And like Stanley, they returned with incredible tales of cannibals and pygmies, ruined jungle civilizations, and fabulous lost treasures."

"It was a soft, warm womb—an impression heightened by the cramped, almost claustrophobic quality of the room, packed with electronic equipment."

"Everything in her trailer, including the television, was controlled on a twenty-four-hour cycle by the computer."

"Amy was four and a half feet tall, and weighed 130 pounds. She was an immensely strong animal."

"David Bergman noted that 'what Amy actually draws is a cluster of apparently related images: inverted crescent shapes, or semicircles, which are always associated with an area of vertical green streaks.'"

"The dreams are an attempt to rationalize events in her daily life."

"The dreams are a species-specific phenomenon."

"Amy had never flown before, and had never seen an airplane at close hand."

"We are producing an educated animal elite which demonstrates the same snobbish aloofness that a Ph.D. shows toward a truck driver."

"But the truth was that no one really knew what would happen when a primate was taken into the field. Because no one had done it: Amy would be the first."

"Grooming behavior was important in ordering the group’s social dominance structure—there was a pattern by which animals groomed each other, and with what frequency."

"So no one has ever found it," Elliot said. Ross shook her head. "I think several expeditions found the city," she said. "But nobody ever got back out again."

"There’s no substitute for ground truth, the experience of a team actually on the site, finding out what’s there."

"It’s not enough to find a mineral source; the minerals had to be extractable at a specified unit cost."

"Men could survive for weeks without food, but they would die in a matter of hours without water."

"But what was obvious to the human eye was not obvious to the computer scanner."

"The computer’s picking the fastest route. You see it’s just identified a timeline that will get us on-site in six days eighteen hours and fifty-one minutes. Now it’s trying to beat that time."

"But by 1972, it was possible to fit 1,000 units on a chip, and by 1974, 10,000 units. It was expected that by 1980, there would be one million units on a single silicon chip the size of a thumbnail."

"Because if there really had been a piggyback slurp, their chances of winning the race were vanishing—before any of them had even set foot in the rain forests of central Africa."

"That’s right," Ross said coldly. "You’re expendable."

"And for the next fifteen minutes, he tickled her as she rolled on the floor and grunted in deep satisfaction."

"Once you put a line over two thousand miles from Houston to Greenbelt, you begged for a piggyback data slurp."

"The few remaining Victorian buildings lie stranded in a modern city of half a million, with traffic jams, stoplights, skyscrapers, supermarkets, same-day dry cleaners, French restaurants, and air pollution."

"The pilot remained with the helicopter; his final words were disquieting. "Where there’s garbage, there’s rats," he said."

""We’ll take the Ragora north. Very fast river, no problem."
"The Ragora’s too dangerous."
"We’ll have to see," Munro said, although he knew that she was right."

""If a man has to do something dangerous," he said later, ‘it helps to be angry. It’s for his own protection, really. Better he should hate someone than fall apart."

"My job was to get those people into the Congo, not scare them to death. There was plenty of time for that."

"Nothing was happening. It had been at least three minutes since he’d jumped from the plane."

"The sense of adventure, of unexpected events that might occur at any future moment."

"Enjoy the forest. This is the last time you’ll feel cool and dry for quite a while."

"You eat fowls and goats, and we eat men; why not? What is the difference?"

"The only reason she felt uneasy was that the forest was so little understood."

"But we Kikuyu say no one escapes from life alive. No relaxing now, Doctors!"

"The gentle, soft-eyed deer actually lived in a ruthless, nasty society, while the supposedly vicious wolf was devoted to family and offspring in exemplary fashion."

"Without the hippopotamus, African rivers would be sterile."

"Herodotus’s ‘river horse’ was the largest African mammal after the elephant."

"It was now recognized that the gentle, soft-eyed deer actually lived in a ruthless, nasty society."

"At night, we hope no," Kahega said. "But me, I think yes."

"Somehow," Ross said wearily, "I believe him."

"In that moment Elliot felt as if the puzzle that preoccupied him, that had caused so much anguish for so many months, was explained."

"Right now," Ross said, "we can't be sure of anything at all."

"That’s all well and good," Munro said. "But I’m interested in how they act, not how they look."

"Apes have for centuries managed to get along with human beings, as ambassadors from their species."

"Some abstract corner of Elliot’s mind considered this discovery tremendously exciting, while at the same time he shared the fear of the others around him."

"But they won’t be much use to us if we’re dead. We have no choice. We must leave if we can."

"The gorillas might be only a few feet away, concealed in the dense foliage, and they wouldn’t know it until it was too late."

"Amy!," he shouted, pulling her fingers away, expecting to feel at any moment the impact of the paddles and the instant of blinding pain.

"From this moment on, we are entirely cut off from the outside world."

"In the face of such weapons, ballistic missiles traveling a mere 17,000 miles an hour are slow-moving dinosaurs from a previous era, as inappropriate as cavalry in World War I, and as easily eliminated."

"Therefore, from the point of view of computers fighting the next war, human beings will be essentially fixed and unchanging elements, like rocks."

"Men have always altered the natural world to suit their purposes."

"As soon as we know something is possible, we have to carry it out."

"Properly sequenced, six ounces of explosive can bring down fifty tons of braced structural steel."

"But Hawaii has its own active volcanoes, and now that Honolulu is a city of half a million, and naval presence is valued at more than thirty billion dollars, the ability to predict tsunami activity secondary to eruptions by Hawaiian volcanoes assumes major long-term significance."

"It was ridiculous; Elliot wondered why Munro was so adamant about the dangers. It was almost as if Munro knew something that Elliot and Ross did not—and could not even imagine."

"The basic tenet of VULCAN was that enormous, pent-up geological forces—whether the forces of an earthquake, or a volcano, or a Pacific typhoon—could be devastatingly unleashed by a relatively small energy trigger."

"Elliot recalled that "everything was moving. We were all literally knocked off our feet; we had to crawl on our hands and knees, like babies."

"The familiar shattering crack of lightning was not punctuation but a continuous sound, a mar like a waterfall."

"They were trudging lost souls in a grim sooty world that seemed like a description of hell; perpetual fire and darkness, where tormented souls screamed in agony."

"YOUTHFUL-ARROGANT (probably) / TENUOUS HUMAN RAPPORT (she particularly resented that one) / DOMINEERING (maybe) INTELLECTUALLY ARROGANT (only natural) / INSENSITIVE (whatever that meant) / DRIVEN TO SUCCEED AT ANY COST(was that so bad?)"

"They’ll wait for nightfall. Then they’ll come back to kill us all."

"The Kigani came running from the forest, the warriors brandishing spears and arrows. Pale white arrows sliced up in the fading light, but they fell short, arcing back down to the ground again. The balloon rose steadily into the sky."