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Jack McDevitt Quotes
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Alyx, she said, you're going to be a legend.
I already am, Captain, she said.
Jack McDevitt
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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
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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
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Defend your opinion only if it can be shown to be true, not because it is your opinion.
Jack McDevitt
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The uplifters are forever running around telling blockheads they would do better if they would believe in themselves. But they already do. That is why they are blockheads.
Jack McDevitt
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It had been his experience that the worst cynics all started out as idealists.
Jack McDevitt
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Embrace your life, find what it is that you love, and pursue it with all your soul. For if you do not, when you come to die, you will find that you have not lived.
Jack McDevitt
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Ah, Lord, if I doubt You, it is perhaps because You hide Yourself so well.
Jack McDevitt
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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.
Jack McDevitt
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The impending collision out there somewhere in the great dark between a gas giant and a world very much like our own has some parallels to the eternal collision between religion and common sense. One is bloated and full of gas, and the other is measurable and solid. One engulfs everything around it, and the other simply provides a place to stand. One is a rogue destroyer that has come in out of the night, and the other is a warm well-lighted place vulnerable to the sainted mobs.
Jack McDevitt
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Freedom and idiots make a volatile mix. And the sad truth is that the idiocy quotient in the general population is alarmingly high.
Jack McDevitt
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He was usually easygoing, one of those guys with little respect for authority because of a conviction that people in charge tend to do stupid things.
Jack McDevitt
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Of course, they (i. e., demons) had always been observed with some regularity, but that could usually be ascribed to an overabundance of piety or wine or imagination. Take your pick.
Jack McDevitt
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Technology is dangerous.
How do you mean?
It can provide horrendous weapons to idiots.
Jack McDevitt
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But, come to think of it, there was no need to wait. Time travelers don't have to wait for anybody.
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I suspect we would be wise, he said without looking up, to avoid declaring what God will or will not allow.
Jack McDevitt
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He was a decent enough guy, but he was always at his worst when he was trying to be sincere.
Jack McDevitt
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Put the money into schools. Rational ones that train young minds to think, to demand that persons in authority show the evidence for the ideas they push. Do that, and we won't need to provide a world for the Sacred Brethren who, given the opportunity, would run everyone else off the planet.
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Sometimes the cost of integrity is the loss of a friend.
Jack McDevitt
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Quote of the day
Yet would we die as some have done: Beating a way for the rising sun.
Arna Bontemps
Jack McDevitt
Born:
April 14, 1935
(age 89)
Bio:
Jack McDevitt is an American science fiction author whose novels frequently deal with attempts to make contact with alien races, and with archaeology or xenoarchaeology.
Known for:
The Engines of God (1994)
Chindi (2002)
Deepsix (2001)
A Talent for War (1989)
Ancient Shores (1996)
Most used words:
people
truth
years
problem
evidence
time
macallister
experience
human
life
idiots
species
reality
faith
power
Jack McDevitt on Wikipedia
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