Jack Mcdevitt

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.

Why is it that people want so desperately to shake hands with otherworldly beings? That people will even insist that they have seen visitors from Spica hovering above their backyards? In other times it was ghosts and fairies and goblins, and voices in the night. Is the company of our own species so dull that we need to invent the Other? On the other hand, maybe that explains it.

Put the money into schools. Rational ones that train young minds to think, to demand that persons in authority show the evidence for the ideas they push. Do that, and we won’t need to provide a world for the Sacred Brethren who, given the opportunity, would run everyone else off the planet.

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.

Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects.

Plato is correct about democracy. It is essentially mob rule. And once the mob gets an idea into its collective head, it’s almost impossible to get it out, or modify it in any way. In an era of mass communication and irresponsible media, it can be a deadly characteristic.

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

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.

Faith is conviction without evidence, and sometimes even in the face of contrary evidence. In some quarters, this quality is perceived as a virtue.

The earliest religious feeling MacAllister could recall was being annoyed at Adam, because it was his fault that girls subsequently had to wear clothes.

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.

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