Jack McDevitt Quotes

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

“It’s so old,” she said, “that, had life developed, it would be billions of years older than we are. Imagine what such a civilization might be like.”
Dead, thought MacAllister. That’s what it would be like. The fact that no technologically advanced species had been found in all these years made it pretty clear that the damned things have no staying power. You could see it at home, where, starting with the Cold War, there’d already been a few close calls.
It explained the Fermi Paradox. Nobody visits us because they blow themselves up before they get that far.

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.

Emily had not been trained as a scientist, so she tended to draw conclusions based on emotional need rather than on evidence.

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.

The media have gone berserk."
"The media always go berserk. A kid falls off a bike in Montana, they're all over it. Until something else happens.

What would happen is that people like Geroge and Alyx would grow old and die chasing a dream. Although there were probably worse things to do with one’s life.

Max was the exception. He had no taste for military life or for the prospect of getting shot at. His father, Colonel Maxwell E. Collingwood, USAF (retired), to his credit, tried to hide his disappointment in his only son. But it was there nonetheless, and Max had, on more than one occasion, overheard him wondering aloud to Max’s mother whether there was anything at all to genetics.

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

If you want data to survive, carve it in rock.

It's all PR," said Hutchins. "If we ever produced a person who was unrelentingly honest, everybody would want him dead.

Politicians always seemed to be willing to sacrifice the general welfare to win votes.

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

The people who devised physical theory and constructed jump engines were not the same people who made political decisions, or who allowed themselves to be swept up by the current media craze, or to be ruled by centuries-old traditions that might once have served to hold nations together but now had become counterproductive.
Don’t assume that a species is intelligent because it produces intelligent individuals.

Starships, of course, have few limitations with regard to design, the prime specification being simply that they not disintegrate during acceleration or course change.