Jack McDevitt
American science fiction author.
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.
The earliest religious feeling MacAllister could recall was being annoyed at Adam, because it was his fault that girls subsequently had to wear clothes.
Truth, beaten down, may well rise again. But there’s a reason it gets beaten down. Usually, we don’t like it very much.
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.
Yes, it was not journalism’s finest hour. But, MacAllister often argued, it never had been.
And because she so desperately wanted it to be true, she knew she could not manage an objective judgment.
Decisions are always made with insufficient information. If you really knew what was going on, the decision would make itself.
“Organized mayhem,” Nick commented, “seems to be the chief preoccupation of intelligent species everywhere.”
The idiots always rose to the top and made policy.
It explained a lot of things.
The creative act requires both will and intelligence. Breaking things is easy. You only need a hammer.
See what the world looks like from orbit. Well, in that way, at least, there was profit to be had. Nobody could look down at the planet, green and blue, with no borders in evidence and no sign of human habitation, and not get his perspective forever altered.
There’d been studies over the years supporting the proposition that groups composed exclusively of women usually made intelligent decisions, that exclusively male groups did a bit less well, and that mixed groups did most poorly of all, by a substantial margin. It appeared that, when women were present, testosterone got the upper hand and men took greater risks than they might otherwise. Correspondingly, women in the mixed group tended to revert to roles, becoming more passive, and going along with whatever misjudgment the males might perpetrate.
Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects.
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.
Don't assume that a species is intelligent because it produces intelligent individuals.
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.
Tides are like politics. They come and go with a great deal of fuss and noise, but inevitably they leave the beach just as they found it. On those few occasions when major change does occur, it is rarely good news.
“One should always be skeptical. That’s always been our problem. We have too many believers.”
“Believers in what?”
“In everything.”
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.
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.