Most government and corporate leaders would have trouble getting people to follow them out of a burning building. One way you can tell the worst of t… - Jack McDevitt

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.

Never look for complexity in diplomatic decisions. With very few exceptions, actions always devolve—and that’s the exact term—from someone’s self-interest. Not the national self-interest, by the way. We are talking here about individual careers.

Organized mayhem," Nick commented, "seems to be the chief preoccupation of intelligent species everywhere.