Jack McDevitt
American science fiction author.
MacAllister wasn’t always right, but he was smart enough to know that. He was willing to change his mind when the evidence pointed in a different direction. That fact alone put MacAllister very nearly in a class by himself.
Maybe the universe doesn’t approve of places like New York.
Embrace your life, find what it is that you love, and pursue it with all your soul. For if you do not, when you come to die, you will find that you have not lived.
He objected on principle to the powerful.
There is no justice. There are occasional acts of vengeance, or regret, but there’s no real justice. In the natural scheme of things, it is not possible.
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.
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.
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.
Truth is slippery, not because it is difficult to grasp, but because we prefer our preconceptions, our beliefs, our myths.
Defend your opinion only if it can be shown to be true, not because it is your opinion.
If you're right, and nobody really cares what’s out there, I wonder whether we’re even worth saving.
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.
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.
“One should always be skeptical. That’s always been our problem. We have too many believers.”
“Believers in what?”
“In everything.”
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.
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.
Don't assume that a species is intelligent because it produces intelligent individuals.
“Technology is dangerous.”
“How do you mean?”
“It can provide horrendous weapons to idiots.”
Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects.
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.