Jack McDevitt Quotes

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

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.

He objected on principle to the powerful.

He would make a good manager, but he had a little too much integrity to survive in a top job.

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

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

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

He’d grown a mustache since Randall had last seen him. It was hard to understand why: He looked devious enough without it.

A man is entitled to only one great passion in a lifetime. Whether it’s music or a profession or a woman, everything else pales in its afterglow. The searing shock so changes one’s chemistry that if the object is lost, the experience can never be repeated. Only anticlimax remains.

I suspect we would be wise," he said without looking up, "to avoid declaring what God will or will not allow.

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.

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

I can't imagine," said Dupre, "a better way to unnerve people than to tell them there's no cause for alarm.

Secrecy is a compulsive reflex in this country. It strangles thought, delays scientific progress, and destroys integrity.

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