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.

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

So we have progressed to the point where we can move politicians around faster than light. I'm not sure I see the advantage.

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.

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.

A child’s mind is open to learn, and it is a cruel and heartless thing to fill it with myth disguised as history, to impose upon it a bogus lifelong perspective, and close it up again, leaving it proof against common sense and all argument. Surely, if there is a hell, people who do this are the ones who will get their tickets punched.
A judgment by the God who devised the quantum system should be considerably different from the one the Reverend Koestler envisions. I gave you a sky full of stars, and you never raised your eyes. I gave you a brain, and you never used it.

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

Plato is correct about democracy. It is essentially mob rule. And once the mob gets an idea into its collective head, it’s almost impossible to get it out, or modify it in any way. In an era of mass communication and irresponsible media, it can be a deadly characteristic.

Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.

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

Throughout our long and sorry history it has been men who supposed themselves to be exemplars of integrity who have done all the damage. Every crusade, whether for decent literary standards or to cover women’s bodies or to free the holy land, had been launched, endorsed, and enthusiastically perpetrated by men of character.

The earliest religious feeling MacAllister could recall was being annoyed at Adam, because it was his fault that girls subsequently had to wear clothes.

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

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.

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.