Jack McDevitt
American science fiction author.
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.
The queen of virtues is the recognition of one’s own flaws.
How does it happen that the most intractable types always rise to the top?
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.
He would make a good manager, but he had a little too much integrity to survive in a top job.
In the larger scale of things, his opinions didn’t count anyhow. The politicians made the decisions, and the voters paid no attention.
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.
Fiction is unlike reality because it has an end, a conclusion, which allows the characters to stroll happily, or perhaps simply more wisely, out through the climax into the epilogue. But life is a tapestry. It has no satisfactory end. There are simply periods of acceleration and delay, victory and frustration, seasoned with periodic jolts of reality.
So long as you believe in some truth you do not believe in yourself. You are a servant. A man of faith.
“It’s all PR,” said Hutchins. “If we ever produced a person who was unrelentingly honest, everybody would want him dead.”
An optimist is somebody who thinks our various political and social systems, schools and churches, support groups and Boy Scout troops, jury trials and congressional committees, are on the up-and-up. That they are intended for the benefit of the members. The reality is that they are designed to keep everyone in line.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I think life is just one long series of blown opportunities.”
(He was) tall and lean, an aristocrat by inclination, born into money and influence and never recovered.
It had been his experience that the worst cynics all started out as idealists.
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.
“The media have gone berserk.”
“The media always go berserk. A kid falls off a bike in Montana, they’re all over it. Until something else happens.”
So we have progressed to the point where we can move politicians around faster than light. I'm not sure I see the advantage.
Faith has its price. When misfortune strikes the true believer, he assumes he has done something to deserve punishment, but isn’t quite certain what. The realist, recognizing that he lives in a Darwinian universe, is simply grateful to have made it to another sunset.
If you're paying attention to your wardrobe, Rudy believed, your mind isn’t sufficiently occupied.
Plato is correct about democracy. It is essentially mob rule. And once the mob gets an idea into its collective head, it’s almost impossible to get it out, or modify it in any way. In an era of mass communication and irresponsible media, it can be a deadly characteristic.