Jack McDevitt
American science fiction author.
If you're right, and nobody really cares what’s out there, I wonder whether we’re even worth saving.
Defend your opinion only if it can be shown to be true, not because it is your opinion.
Truth is slippery, not because it is difficult to grasp, but because we prefer our preconceptions, our beliefs, our myths.
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.
“Alyx,” she said, “you're going to be a legend.”
“I already am, Captain,” she said.
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.”
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.
“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.”