Jack McDevitt Quotes
-
If you're right, and nobody really cares what’s out there, I wonder whether we’re even worth saving.
-
(He was) tall and lean, an aristocrat by inclination, born into money and influence and never recovered.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Politicians always seemed to be willing to sacrifice the general welfare to win votes.
-
It had been his experience that the worst cynics all started out as idealists.
-
He’d grown a mustache since Randall had last seen him. It was hard to understand why: He looked devious enough without it.
-
Her experience had taught her that people who insisted on having others recognize their outstanding qualities usually didn’t have any.
-
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.
-
Don't assume that a species is intelligent because it produces intelligent individuals.
-
Freedom and idiots make a volatile mix. And the sad truth is that the idiocy quotient in the general population is alarmingly high.
-
In the larger scale of things, his opinions didn’t count anyhow. The politicians made the decisions, and the voters paid no attention.
-
If you're paying attention to your wardrobe, Rudy believed, your mind isn’t sufficiently occupied.
-
He was a decent enough guy, but he was always at his worst when he was trying to be sincere.
-
Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.
-
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.
-
Faith is conviction without evidence, and sometimes even in the face of contrary evidence. In some quarters, this quality is perceived as a virtue.
-
The only people he knew of who would have leveled material advantage so that no one had any were of course those who had none to start with.
-
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.
-
'Organized mayhem,' Nick commented, 'seems to be the chief preoccupation of intelligent species everywhere.'
-
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.
-
New worlds are always hard on old ideas.
-
If you want creative and successful children, resign yourself to jousting with rebels.
-
One could not always put safety up front as the prime goal. Do that, and who would ever achieve anything of note?