Jack McDevitt - Time Quotes

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Our generation faces only one danger, that we might say to ourselves this is not our problem, and that we will pass it off to the distant future. That we might shrug and say to ourselves that a thousand years is a long time. That we will become complacent and conclude that this problem will take care of itself.
But I say to you, we should take no satisfaction in the fact that we ourselves are in no physical danger. This is a hazard to our world, to everything we hope to pass on to future generations. And it is clear that we should act now, while we have the time.

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
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
But, come to think of it, there was no need to wait. Time travelers don't have to wait for anybody.

Jack McDevitt
It had occurred to Rimford, at about the time he approached fifty, that the chief drawback in contemplating the enormous gulfs of time and space that constitute the bricks and mortar of the cosmologist is that one acquires a dismaying perception of the handful of years allotted a human being.

Jack McDevitt
Certain types of decisions can be safely ignored. Some issues will go away with the passage of time, others will be so slow developing that the decision-makers will depart before the results of their neglect becomes manifest. Which brings us to the environment.

Jack McDevitt