Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Crichton

Crichton’s line lands like a scalpel aimed at modern expertise: a culture addicted to capability and allergic to restraint. The phrasing is deceptively plain, almost procedural, which is part of the sting. “Can” is the language of engineers, labs, start-ups, and boardrooms; it’s measurable, fundable, demo-ready. “Should” is slower, messier, and politically inconvenient because it drags in risk, accountability, and values that can’t be A/B tested. By casting “they” as a generalized class, Crichton widens the target beyond cartoonish mad scientists to anyone who treats innovation as its own moral permission slip.

The subtext is classic Crichton: skepticism toward institutional self-regard and the mythology of progress. In his novels, catastrophe rarely comes from overt villainy; it comes from competent people doing “the next logical step” while outsourcing ethics to after-the-fact committees. This sentence compresses that whole narrative engine into a single moral asymmetry: technical ambition naturally expands, while moral deliberation is treated as a brake rather than part of steering.

Context matters. Writing in the late 20th century, Crichton watched biotech, computing, and corporate R&D accelerate faster than public understanding or regulation. His fiction turned those anxieties into page-turners, but the argument is serious: when “can” becomes the only question, power starts masquerading as neutrality. The line works because it indicts a habit of mind, not a single technology, and because it makes the omission - the missing “should” - feel like negligence rather than innocence.