Jack McDevitt Quotes

The problem is that too often the only people who can act don’t want change. Power doesn’t so much corrupt as it breeds conservatism.

Katie commented that Americans had lost the ability to enjoy themselves.
“We watch television,” Dave said.

Freedom and idiots make a volatile mix. And the sad truth is that the idiocy quotient in the general population is alarmingly high.

If you want creative and successful children, resign yourself to jousting with rebels.

We are forever trying to sell science because somebody somewhere will get a better toothbrush," she grumbled. "Whatever happened to sheer curiosity?

“Alyx,” she said, “you're going to be a legend.”
“I already am, Captain,” she said.

Why is it that people want so desperately to shake hands with otherworldly beings? That people will even insist that they have seen visitors from Spica hovering above their backyards? In other times it was ghosts and fairies and goblins, and voices in the night. Is the company of our own species so dull that we need to invent the Other? On the other hand, maybe that explains it.

Charlie was not a believer. He did not expect to be called to account and assigned a score for what he had done or left undone. His parents had believed in a mechanical world, a place of evolving hardware and software, no deities need apply. We just haven’t figured it all out yet, his father was fond of saying. Things get more complex and we don’t know why. But that doesn’t mean we have to ascribe it to divine providence.

Like his father, he believed the universe a clockwork mechanism; and if there was a clockmaker, he’d hidden himself too well and had therefore no justifiable complaint with unbelievers.

Well, kids are never much on history. Nor for that matter was anybody else. It had been MacAllister’s experience that most people think anything that happened before they were born didn’t count for a whole lot.

We can create the appearance of knowledge, the illusion of knowing how to grapple with a problem. Far too many educational systems have done exactly that. The result is generations of mouthpieces who can pour forth approved responses to programmed stimuli that contribute nothing to rational discussion. Dogma is for those who only wish to be comfortable. Catechisms are for cowards; commandments, for control freaks who have so little respect for their species that they are driven to appeal to a higher power to keep everyone in line.

MacAllister commented recently that Plato was right, that democracy is mob rule, that the voters can be counted on consistently to find the candidate with the fewest scruples and put him in office.

He was a good salesman, which was to say he could look people directly in the eye while making the most preposterous claims.

Defend your opinion only if it can be shown to be true, not because it is your opinion.

One could not always put safety up front as the prime goal. Do that, and who would ever achieve anything of note?