Jack McDevitt - Macallister Quotes

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Well, kids are never much on history. Nor for that matter was anybody else. It had been MacAllister's experience that most people think anything that happened before they were born didn't count for a whole lot.

Jack McDevitt
Yes, it was not journalism's finest hour. But, MacAllister often argued, it never had been.

Jack McDevitt
The earliest religious feeling MacAllister could recall was being annoyed at Adam, because it was his fault that girls subsequently had to wear clothes.

Jack McDevitt
It's so old, she said, that, had life developed, it would be billions of years older than we are. Imagine what such a civilization might be like.
Dead, thought MacAllister. That's what it would be like. The fact that no technologically advanced species had been found in all these years made it pretty clear that the damned things have no staying power. You could see it at home, where, starting with the Cold War, there'd already been a few close calls.
It explained the Fermi Paradox. Nobody visits us because they blow themselves up before they get that far.

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
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