Jack McDevitt Quotes

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

If you're paying attention to your wardrobe, Rudy believed, your mind isn’t sufficiently occupied.

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.

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.

There is no justice. There are occasional acts of vengeance, or regret, but there’s no real justice. In the natural scheme of things, it is not possible.

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.

Fiction is unlike reality because it has an end, a conclusion, which allows the characters to stroll happily, or perhaps simply more wisely, out through the climax into the epilogue. But life is a tapestry. It has no satisfactory end. There are simply periods of acceleration and delay, victory and frustration, seasoned with periodic jolts of reality.

(He was) tall and lean, an aristocrat by inclination, born into money and influence and never recovered.

The creative act requires both will and intelligence. Breaking things is easy. You only need a hammer.

The beginning of wisdom is to admit to being inept. We’re all a bit slow. We have our moments, but in the end, we have to resort to bumbling through. It is what makes conviction so egregious.

Decisions are always made with insufficient information. If you really knew what was going on, the decision would make itself.

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

The Reverend Pullman sat on the opposite side of the bench, wearing clerical garb and one of those unctuous smiles that proclaims a monopoly on truth.

I'm not optimistic," he said. "The issue clearly flies in the face of the First Amendment. People have a right to tell kids whatever they want about religion."
"Do they have a right to push human sacrifice?"
"Of course not, Mac. But this isn't human sacrifice. It's just a church school."
"I'm not sure the effect isn't similar.

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