Jack Mcdevitt

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

The idiots always rose to the top and made policy.

It explained a lot of things.

Decisions are always made with insufficient information. If you really knew what was going on, the decision would make itself.

In the larger scale of things, his opinions didn’t count anyhow. The politicians made the decisions, and the voters paid no attention.

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.

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

“One should always be skeptical. That’s always been our problem. We have too many believers.”

“Believers in what?”

“In everything.”

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.

How does it happen that the most intractable types always rise to the top?

What would happen is that people like Geroge and Alyx would grow old and die chasing a dream. Although there were probably worse things to do with one’s life.

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.

He would make a good manager, but he had a little too much integrity to survive in a top job.