Jack McDevitt: Trending quotes

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Jack McDevitt: 250 quotes3 likes

“It’s all PR,” said Hutchins. “If we ever produced a person who was unrelentingly honest, everybody would want him dead.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Cauldron (2007), Chapter 13 (p. 127)

“Never confuse perfection with production. People who don’t make mistakes aren’t doing anything.”

Jack McDevitt book Ancient Shores

Source: Ancient Shores (1996), Chapter 6 (p. 55)

“Prudence, and experience, suggested she expect the worst.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Omega (2003), Chapter 3 (p. 46)

“Truth, beaten down, may well rise again. But there’s a reason it gets beaten down. Usually, we don’t like it very much.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 33 (p. 296)

“Don't assume that a species is intelligent because it produces intelligent individuals.”

Jack McDevitt book Infinity Beach

Infinity Beach (2000)

“Organized mayhem,” Nick commented, “seems to be the chief preoccupation of intelligent species everywhere.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Chindi (2002), Chapter 31 (p. 432)

“The idiots always rose to the top and made policy.
It explained a lot of things.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 22 (p. 200)

“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.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Deepsix (2001), Chapter 10 (p. 165)

“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.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Deepsix (2001), Chapter 6 (p. 94)

“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.”

Jack McDevitt book The Hercules Text

Source: The Hercules Text (1986), Chapter 3 (p. 37)

“But the old man had provided his kids with one priceless gift: He’d encouraged them to read, and he didn’t bother too much about the content, subscribing to the theory that good books ultimately speak for themselves.”

Jack McDevitt book Ancient Shores

Source: Ancient Shores (1996), Chapter 16 (p. 168)

“We’re talking about something we all want very much to find. And that automatically makes Ed’s conclusions suspect.”

Jack McDevitt book The Hercules Text

Source: The Hercules Text (1986), Chapter 2 (p. 30)

“If some of the current politicians had been around a few thousand years ago,” she’d said, “we never would have gotten out of Africa. Boats cost too much.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Cauldron (2007), Chapter 4 (pp. 46-47)

“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.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Deepsix (2001), Chapter 4 (p. 72)

“It had been his experience that the worst cynics all started out as idealists.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 18 (p. 166)

“The invention of the printing press probably marks the beginning of the decline of civilization. Once you have it, science follows close behind. Next thing you know the idiots have better weaponry. Then atom bombs. Meantime, social organization becomes increasingly dependent on technology, which becomes increasingly vulnerable to error or sabotage. If we can judge by our own experience, it looks as if you get the printing press, then about a thousand years. After that it’s back to the trees.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 27 (p. 243)

“We can create the appearance of knowledge, the illusion of knowing how to grapple with a problem. Far too many educational systems have done exactly that. The result is generations of mouthpieces who can pour forth approved responses to programmed stimuli that contribute nothing to rational discussion. Dogma is for those who only wish to be comfortable. Catechisms are for cowards; commandments, for control freaks who have so little respect for their species that they are driven to appeal to a higher power to keep everyone in line.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 21 (p. 193)

“The reality is, we don’t want our kids to be smart. We want them to be like us. Only more so.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 4 (p. 37)

““It’s so old,” she said, “that, had life developed, it would be billions of years older than we are. Imagine what such a civilization might be like.”
Dead, thought MacAllister. That’s what it would be like. The fact that no technologically advanced species had been found in all these years made it pretty clear that the damned things have no staying power. You could see it at home, where, starting with the Cold War, there’d already been a few close calls.
It explained the Fermi Paradox. Nobody visits us because they blow themselves up before they get that far.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 27 (p. 248)

“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.”

Jack McDevitt

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Deepsix (2001), Chapter 22 (p. 323)