Jack McDevitt Quotes

It had been his experience that the worst cynics all started out as idealists.

Sometimes the cost of integrity is the loss of a friend.

New worlds are always hard on old ideas.

The reality is, we don’t want our kids to be smart. We want them to be like us. Only more so.

Sheyel had always maintained that few actions are driven by reason. People act out of emotion, perception, prejudice. They will believe what they’ve always believed, filtering out all evidence to the contrary. Until they go too far and run onto the rocks of reality.

How does it happen that the most intractable types always rise to the top?

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.

The stars are silent.
Voyager among dark harbors, I listen, but the midnight wind carries only the sound of trees and water lapping against the gunwale and the solitary cry of the night swallow.
There is no dawn. No searing sun rises in east or west. The rocks over Calumal do not silver, and the great round world slides through the void.

Henry had been around long enough to know better than to disagree. But he forgot to implement.

Mac continued to write scathing commentary on assorted hypocrisies in high places and low, without which hypocrisies, he cheerfully conceded, civilized life would be impossible.

Truth is slippery, not because it is difficult to grasp, but because we prefer our preconceptions, our beliefs, our myths.

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.

There is, he’d said, an inverse correlation between the amount of power a person has and the level at which his or her mind functions. A person of ordinary intelligence who acquires power, of whatever kind, tends to develop an exaggerated view of his own capabilities. Sycophants gather. There is little or no criticism of decisions. As his ability to disrupt the lives of others advances, these tendencies become stronger. Eventually you end with Louis the Fourteenth, who thinks he’s done a good job for France, although the country he left behind was ruined.

“How are you going to define ‘spiritual’?” asked Mona. No one had any idea.

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.