Jack McDevitt Quotes

Ah, Lord, if I doubt You, it is perhaps because You hide Yourself so well.

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.

He was a decent enough guy, but he was always at his worst when he was trying to be sincere.

We are not a debating club," Franklin said. "Our goal is to get at the truth, where that is possible.

When do we reach a point where people become responsible for their own actions?

Ev was a careful man, a model of caution. He took pride in not committing to a view until all the facts were in. Which meant, of course, that he was never quite on board. Or in opposition.

Prudence, and experience, suggested she expect the worst.

Lasker mouthed, “Trust him,” and Max sighed. Trust a lawyer? It flew in the face of his most cherished principles.

Her experience had taught her that people who insisted on having others recognize their outstanding qualities usually didn’t have any.

Politics was a struggle for power, in its purest and simplest terms. If the voters were lucky, the winner would go on to improve their lot, because he would need their votes next time. Or because he enjoyed being popular. But issues were irrelevant. Always had been, probably. Once the age of mass communications arrived, presidents became entertainers, celebrities, if they were smart. FDR used his fireside chats; Kennedy had allowed spontaneous questions at press conferences, relying on wit and charm. Reagan knew from the films exactly how a president should behave, and he had exactly enough acting talent to bring it off. In that sense, he was the first modern president.

Come on, Harold. People like us can always find experts to tell us what we want to hear. It’s the biggest problem we have. Everybody lies to us because they want things from us.

Few of the virtues are really useful. Fidelity leads to lost opportunity, truth-telling to injured feelings, charity to additional solicitations. The least productive, and possibly the most overrated, is faith. The faithful deny reason, close their minds to the evidence of their senses, and remain unfailingly optimistic in the face of disaster. They inevitably get just what they deserve.

It was housed in one of those garish ultramodern steel and glass abstract buildings, designed to demonstrate a kind of mathematical flow but which really only succeeded in marring the landscape.

I suspect we would be wise," he said without looking up, "to avoid declaring what God will or will not allow.

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.