Jack McDevitt Quotes
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Freedom and idiots make a volatile mix. And the sad truth is that the idiocy quotient in the general population is alarmingly high.
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A man is entitled to only one great passion in a lifetime. Whether it’s music or a profession or a woman, everything else pales in its afterglow. The searing shock so changes one’s chemistry that if the object is lost, the experience can never be repeated. Only anticlimax remains.
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(He remarked) that anyone who truly wished to develop tolerance toward other human beings should start by casting aside any and all religious affiliation. When challenged by one of the other guests, he had asked innocently whether anyone could name a single person put to death or driven from his home by an atheist over theological matters.
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The earliest religious feeling MacAllister could recall was being annoyed at Adam, because it was his fault that girls subsequently had to wear clothes.
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We know that when change comes, no one is more adamant in holding on to the past than those in power. They know change is inevitable, but they would, if they could, parcel it out in measured pieces. Grain for chickens.
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In the larger scale of things, his opinions didn’t count anyhow. The politicians made the decisions, and the voters paid no attention.
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The notion that we need a higher power, that’s more a human failing than a reflection of reality. The universe pays no attention to what we need. Truth is what it is, and the inconveniences it might cause us don’t change anything.
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Most government and corporate leaders would have trouble getting people to follow them out of a burning building. One way you can tell the worst of them is that they talk about leadership a lot. I doubt Winston Churchill ever used the word. Or, for that matter, Attila the Hun.
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He was a decent enough guy, but he was always at his worst when he was trying to be sincere.
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(He was) tall and lean, an aristocrat by inclination, born into money and influence and never recovered.
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Gambini was addicted to asking the sort of ultimate questions about which one could speculate endlessly with no fear of ever arriving at a solution.
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If you're right, and nobody really cares what’s out there, I wonder whether we’re even worth saving.
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Faith is conviction without evidence, and sometimes even in the face of contrary evidence. In some quarters, this quality is perceived as a virtue.
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It had been his experience that the worst cynics all started out as idealists.
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Ah, Lord, if I doubt You, it is perhaps because You hide Yourself so well.
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'Organized mayhem,' Nick commented, 'seems to be the chief preoccupation of intelligent species everywhere.'
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He objected on principle to the powerful.
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Fiction is unlike reality because it has an end, a conclusion, which allows the characters to stroll happily, or perhaps simply more wisely, out through the climax into the epilogue. But life is a tapestry. It has no satisfactory end. There are simply periods of acceleration and delay, victory and frustration, seasoned with periodic jolts of reality.
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New worlds are always hard on old ideas.
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Plato is correct about democracy. It is essentially mob rule. And once the mob gets an idea into its collective head, it’s almost impossible to get it out, or modify it in any way. In an era of mass communication and irresponsible media, it can be a deadly characteristic.
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If you're paying attention to your wardrobe, Rudy believed, your mind isn’t sufficiently occupied.
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It is not faith per se that creates the problem; it is conviction, the notion that one cannot be wrong, that opposing views are necessarily invalid and may even be intolerable.
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Secrecy is a compulsive reflex in this country. It strangles thought, delays scientific progress, and destroys integrity.
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If you want creative and successful children, resign yourself to jousting with rebels.