Jack McDevitt - People Quotes

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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 them is that they talk about leadership a lot. I doubt Winston Churchill ever used the word. Or, for that matter, Attila the Hun.

Jack McDevitt
Life is a walk in the fog. Most people don't know that. They're fooled by the sunlight into thinking they can see what's ahead. But it's the reason they are forever getting lost or falling into ditches or committing matrimony.

Jack McDevitt
People tend to believe that good fortune consists of equal parts talent, hard work, and sheer luck. It's hard to deny the roles of the latter two. As to talent, I would only say it consists primarily in finding the right moment to step in.

Jack McDevitt
The truth is that when your people don't tell you what you need to know, it's a failure of leadership.

Jack McDevitt
Solitude is only a good idea if you have the right people along to share it.

Jack McDevitt
The term congressional hearing is an oxymoron. No congressional hearing is ever called to gather information. Rather, it is an exercise designed strictly for posturing, by people who have already made up their minds, looking for ammunition to support their positions.

Jack McDevitt
When things go wrong, the standard management strategy is to decide who takes the blame. This should be an underling, as far down the chain as possible, but preferably with some visibility so people know management means business.

Jack McDevitt
Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects.

Jack McDevitt
Her experience had taught her that people who insisted on having others recognize their outstanding qualities usually didn't have any.

Jack McDevitt
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.

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

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

Jack McDevitt
What would happen is that people like Geroge and Alyx would grow old and die chasing a dream. Although there were probably worse things to do with one's life.

Jack McDevitt
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
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
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
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
The only people he knew of who would have leveled material advantage so that no one had any were of course those who had none to start with.

Jack McDevitt
I'm not optimistic, he said. The issue clearly flies in the face of the First Amendment. People have a right to tell kids whatever they want about religion.
Do they have a right to push human sacrifice?
Of course not, Mac. But this isn't human sacrifice. It's just a church school.
I'm not sure the effect isn't similar.

Jack McDevitt