Jack McDevitt Quotes

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

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.

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

He was usually easygoing, one of those guys with little respect for authority because of a conviction that people in charge tend to do stupid things.

He expected to have only one clear shot at the assorted joys of living, and he had no intention of risking it to meet someone else’s misconceived expectations.

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.

If some of the current politicians had been around a few thousand years ago," she'd said, "we never would have gotten out of Africa. Boats cost too much.

The cultures we can look at had already grasped the essential unity of nature. No board of gods can survive that knowledge.

Those who rise to the top of organizations, who live to direct others, to wield power, are inevitably afflicted by weak egos, by a need to prove themselves. This explains why they are so easily frightened and so easily manipulated. And why they are so dangerous.

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.

Embrace your life, find what it is that you love, and pursue it with all your soul. For if you do not, when you come to die, you will find that you have not lived.

In the larger scale of things, his opinions didn’t count anyhow. The politicians made the decisions, and the voters paid no attention.

Truth, beaten down, may well rise again. But there’s a reason it gets beaten down. Usually, we don’t like it very much.

The queen of virtues is the recognition of one’s own flaws.

Faith has its price. When misfortune strikes the true believer, he assumes he has done something to deserve punishment, but isn’t quite certain what. The realist, recognizing that he lives in a Darwinian universe, is simply grateful to have made it to another sunset.