Jack McDevitt Quotes

117 Sourced Quotes

Sometimes, he said, I think life is just one long series of blown opportunities.

Jack McDevitt
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.

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

Jack McDevitt
Idiots are not responsible for what they do. The real guilt falls on rational people who sit on their hands while the morons run wild. You can opt out if you want to. Play it safe. But if you do, don't complain when the roof comes down.

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

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

Jack McDevitt
During his sixty-odd years, he had found there were as many louts in the patrician classes as there were ignoramuses farther down the social spectrum.

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

Jack McDevitt
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.

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

Jack McDevitt
Few of the virtues are really useful. Fidelity leads to lost opportunity, truth-telling to injured feelings, charity to additional solicitations. The least productive, and possibly the most overrated, is faith. The faithful deny reason, close their minds to the evidence of their senses, and remain unfailingly optimistic in the face of disaster. They inevitably get just what they deserve.

Jack McDevitt
The man was either foolish or fearless. Assuming there was a difference.

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

Jack McDevitt
At night the sea is very loud,
And voices ride the tide.
At another time, in another place,
Beneath the silent moon,
We laughed together.

Jack McDevitt
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.

Jack McDevitt
We are not a debating club, Franklin said. Our goal is to get at the truth, where that is possible.

Jack McDevitt
MacAllister wasn't always right, but he was smart enough to know that. He was willing to change his mind when the evidence pointed in a different direction. That fact alone put MacAllister very nearly in a class by himself.

Jack McDevitt
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.

Jack McDevitt
Technological civilizations don't last long. You're all right until you get a printing press. Then a race starts between technology and common sense. And maybe technology always wins.

Jack McDevitt
Prudence, and experience, suggested she expect the worst.

Jack McDevitt
Somewhere we taught ourselves that our opinions are more significant than the facts. And somehow we get our egos and our opinions and Truth all mixed up in a single package, so that when something does challenge one of the notions to which we subscribe, we react as if it challenges us.

Jack McDevitt
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.

Jack McDevitt
He took particular delight in neutralizing those who desperately needed to be neutralized, those overblown, self-important, arrogant half-wits who were always running about dictating behavior, morals, and theology to everyone else. And he never looked back.

Jack McDevitt
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.

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

Jack McDevitt
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.

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

Jack McDevitt
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.

Jack McDevitt
The kids were both adolescents, at that happy stage where they could simultaneously make him confident about the future while they were sabotaging the present.

Jack McDevitt
Defend your opinion only if it can be shown to be true, not because it is your opinion.

Jack McDevitt