Jack McDevitt
125 quotes
Biography
"Gambini was addicted to asking the sort of ultimate questions about which one could speculate endlessly with no fear of ever arriving at a solution."
"We’re talking about something we all want very much to find. And that automatically makes Ed’s conclusions suspect."
"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."
"Ah, Lord, if I doubt You, it is perhaps because You hide Yourself so well."
"Secrecy is a compulsive reflex in this country. It strangles thought, delays scientific progress, and destroys integrity."
"“I can’t imagine,” said Dupre, “a better way to unnerve people than to tell them there’s no cause for alarm.”"
"Politicians always seemed to be willing to sacrifice the general welfare to win votes."
"“I suspect we would be wise,” he said without looking up, “to avoid declaring what God will or will not allow.”"
"A man is entitled to only one great passion in a lifetime. Whether it’s music or a profession or a woman, everything else pales in its afterglow. The searing shock so changes one’s chemistry that if the object is lost, the experience can never be repeated. Only anticlimax remains."
"He’d grown a mustache since Randall had last seen him. It was hard to understand why: He looked devious enough without it."
"How does it happen that the most intractable types always rise to the top?"
"The cultures we can look at had already grasped the essential unity of nature. No board of gods can survive that knowledge."
"Henry had been around long enough to know better than to disagree. But he forgot to implement."
"He would make a good manager, but he had a little too much integrity to survive in a top job."
"He objected on principle to the powerful."
"The problem is that too often the only people who can act don’t want change. Power doesn’t so much corrupt as it breeds conservatism."
"Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters."
"Maybe the universe doesn’t approve of places like New York."
"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."
"The only people he knew of who would have leveled material advantage so that no one had any were of course those who had none to start with."
"During his sixty-odd years, he had found there were as many louts in the patrician classes as there were ignoramuses farther down the social spectrum."
"(He remarked) that anyone who truly wished to develop tolerance toward other human beings should start by casting aside any and all religious affiliation. When challenged by one of the other guests, he had asked innocently whether anyone could name a single person put to death or driven from his home by an atheist over theological matters."
"Throughout our long and sorry history it has been men who supposed themselves to be exemplars of integrity who have done all the damage. Every crusade, whether for decent literary standards or to cover women’s bodies or to free the holy land, had been launched, endorsed, and enthusiastically perpetrated by men of character."
"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."
"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."