Top 100 Larry Niven Quotes
#1. Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.
Larry Niven
#2. Cliff shrugged. None of their ideas sounded
Larry Niven
#3. In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.
Larry Niven
#4. Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.
Larry Niven
#5. It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.
Larry Niven
#6. That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
Larry Niven
#7. But you've never even been as far as the Moon.
Larry Niven
#9. I do not believe they've run out of surprises.
Larry Niven
#10. I am trying to prevent a bloodbath. Is that clear enough for you? I'm trying to prevent a civil war that could kill half the people in this world.
Larry Niven
#12. I need exercise and solitude. This time of confinement has threatened my sanity!
Larry Niven
#13. My fur is matted, my eyes refuse to refocus, my sthondat-begotten room is too small, my microwave heater heats all meat to the same temperature, and it is the wrong temperature, and I cannot get it fixed.
Larry Niven
#14. The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.
Larry Niven
#15. Boredom is my worst enemy. It's killed a lot of my friends, but it won't get me. When I get bored, I go risk my life somewhere.
Larry Niven
#16. The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.
Larry Niven
#17. We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes.
Larry Niven
#18. In intelligence work we have to go by capabilities, not by intentions. If a potential enemy can do something to you, you have to prepare for it, without regard to what you think he wants to do.
Larry Niven
#19. I don't have a strong interest in history.
Larry Niven
#20. Engineers. You had to love them. (The alternative was strangling them, and he didn't want that catching on.) There
Larry Niven
#21. work, whatever it must be, is the service of God and of the community and therefore the expression of man's dignity. - Emil Brunner, Gifford Lectures, 1948
Larry Niven
#23. Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.
Larry Niven
#25. Mother Nature doesn't care if you're having fun.
Larry Niven
#26. In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Larry Niven
#27. Heat is produced as a waste product of civilization." "I
Larry Niven
#28. Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.
Larry Niven
#29. Everything starts as somebody's dream.
Larry Niven
#30. And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.
Larry Niven
#31. That's the only part that bugs me about this. It's so empty out there." "True. On the other hand, if the Sun blows up we'll be in an unrivaled position to say, 'What was that?'" "Oh,
Larry Niven
#32. There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.
Larry Niven
#33. Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you've got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked.
Larry Niven
#34. Sometimes the only way to call attention to bad construction was to set fire to the building.
Larry Niven
#35. But ... watching Steven Barnes taught me to treat my life like an art form.
Larry Niven
#36. The value of a thing is what that thing will bring. -Legal Maxim
Larry Niven
#37. I'd repair our education system or replace it with something that works.
Larry Niven
#38. There were the meaningless greetings the humans called "formalities": insincere inquiries into the state of health, nebulous benedictions and hopes for past well-being; all compensations for the lack of human Mediators.
Larry Niven
#39. On a world built to ordered specification, there was no logical reason for such a mountain to exist. Yet every world should have at least one unclimbable mountain.
Larry Niven
#40. Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!
Larry Niven
#41. I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.
Larry Niven
#42. The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!
Larry Niven
#43. Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.
Larry Niven
#44. The puppeteer unrolled completely. 'Did I hear you call me cute?
Larry Niven
#46. The Product of Freedom and Security is a constant (F X S = k). Giving up freedom for security is beginning to look naive.
Larry Niven
#47. Jesus Pietro wasn't used to dealing with ghosts. It would require brand new techniques. Grimly he set out to evolve them.
Larry Niven
#48. I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.
Larry Niven
#49. Never be embarrassed or ashamed by anything you choose to write.
Larry Niven
#51. The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.
Larry Niven
#52. Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles. Of the waters we know nothing ...
Larry Niven
#53. I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on.
Larry Niven
#54. The State has a superfluity of testicles, Peersa said with no particular emphasis.
Larry Niven
#56. Louis suggested that the ship be called 'Lying Bastard'. For their own reasons, Teela and Speaker agreed. For his own reason, Nessus did not object.
Larry Niven
#57. Remember the Finagle Laws. The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum. The universe is hostile." "But
Larry Niven
#59. The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum
Larry Niven
#60. The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He's entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you're in violation.
Larry Niven
#61. We play your part in order to understand you, but you each seem to play a thousand parts. It makes things difficult for an honest, hard-working bug-eyed monster.
Larry Niven
#62. The witnessing of titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal.
Larry Niven
#63. Some amiably deranged science-fiction writer had come up with it forty years back and, like so many of his kind, given it away for free - or anyway at fifty cents a word.
Larry Niven
#64. One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better
Larry Niven
#65. Everything starts as somebody's daydream.
Larry Niven
#66. Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.
Larry Niven
#67. The best advice I was ever given was on my twenty-first birthday when my father said, Son, here's a million dollars. Don't lose it.
Larry Niven
#68. I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.
Larry Niven
#69. You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.
Larry Niven
#70. Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.
Larry Niven
#71. Once every hundred years, the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clean as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won't have to look at it.
Larry Niven
#72. Music had played suddenly through the cabin, complex and lovely, rich in minor tones, like the sad call of a sex-maddened computer. Nessus whistled.
Larry Niven
#73. Humans," said the puppeteer, "should not be allowed to run loose. You will surely harm yourselves.
Larry Niven
#74. I've spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.
Larry Niven
#75. If one must explain a magic trick, one should do so after the show is over.
Larry Niven
#76. We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.
Larry Niven
#77. In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.
Larry Niven
#79. If you can heat some bourbon, I can drink it," said the kzin. "If you cannot heat it, I can still drink it." "Nessus?
Larry Niven
#80. The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. - Robert A. Heinlein
Larry Niven
#82. For two hundred and fifty years the kzinti had not attacked human space. They had nothing to attack with. For two hundred and fifty years men had not attacked the kzinti worlds; and no kzin could understand it. Men confused them terribly.
Larry Niven
#83. In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.
Larry Niven
#84. Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.
Larry Niven
#86. We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.
Larry Niven
#88. There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads; and the fuggheads will get all the press.
Larry Niven
#90. Treat your life like something to be sculpted.
Larry Niven
#91. A civilization has the ethics it can afford
Larry Niven
#92. How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?
Larry Niven
#93. As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.
Larry Niven
#94. Why hadn't they built a lot of little Ringworlds instead?
Larry Niven
#95. I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.
Larry Niven
#96. Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.
Larry Niven
#97. In a collaboration, each author will do 75% of the work.
Larry Niven
#98. I asked him, "Do you know the difference between nude and naked?"
He shook his head.
"Nude is artistic. Naked is defenseless.
Larry Niven
#99. It's very difficult for a black man to get out of South-Central Los Angeles, and get out civilized ... The only men I know who have escaped, all began reading Robert Heinlein at age ten.
Larry Niven
#100. I see war as that insane enterprise wherein men dig up the riches of the earth and hurl them at one another. - ATTRIBUTED TO JOSEPH DANIEL HARRINGTON
Larry Niven
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