Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Crichton

Crichton’s line lands like a barroom dare: if “the consensus of scientists” is invoked, you’re about to be hustled. The phrasing matters. “Whenever you hear” turns expertise into mere chatter; “something or other” shrugs off content as interchangeable propaganda. Then comes the punchy, almost noir payoff: “reach for your wallet.” Science becomes a street scam, and the listener is cast as the mark. It’s a novelist’s sentence - tuned for suspicion, not precision - and it works because it flatters the reader’s self-image as the lone clear-eyed skeptic in a world of credentialed con artists.

The subtext is less about science than about authority. “Consensus” is framed as a sales tactic, not a hard-won outcome of competing evidence. That’s a neat rhetorical judo move: it sidesteps the messy question of what the science actually shows and instead attacks the social process by which knowledge becomes public and actionable. In the background is a distinctly late-20th-century mood: institutions losing trust, experts getting recast as lobbyists, and policy debates (from climate to public health) turning technical findings into tribal symbols.

Crichton also builds in a preemptive defense. If you’re persuaded by scientific agreement, you’re “being had”; if you aren’t, you’re independent. The line immunizes its audience against correction by making deference itself the sin. As cultural critique, it’s a sharp capsule of American anti-elitism. As guidance, it’s a trap: it treats the existence of consensus as evidence of corruption, when in practice it can be evidence that a question has survived repeated attempts to knock it down.