Larry Niven Quotes

To be paranoid was to inflate one’s importance, to see oneself as worthy of persecution

Parlette spoke slowly and evenly. "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."

Once the ocean teamed with life, Svetz thought. Now the continental shelf is as dead as the moon: nothing but bubble cities. Once this whole continent was all forest and living desert and fresh water. We cut down the trees and shot the animals and poisoned to the rivers and irrigated the deserts so that even the desert life died; and now there’s nothing left but the food yeast and us.
We’ve forgotten so much about the past that we can’t separate legend from fact. We’ve wiped out most of the forms of life on earth in the last fifteen hundred years, and changed the composition of the air to the extent that we’d be afraid to change it back.
I fear the unknown beasts of the past. I cannot breathe the air. I do not know the edible plants. I could not kill the animals for food. I do not know which would kill me.
The earth’s past is as alien to me as another planet.

5) If you've nothing to say, say it any way you like. Stylistic innovations, contorted story lines or none, exotic or genderless pronouns, internal inconsistencies, the recipe for preparing your lover as a cannibal banquet: feel free. If what you have to say is important and/or difficult to follow, use the simplest language possible. If the reader doesn't get it then, let it not be your fault.

Any citizen, with the help of the organ banks, can live as long as it takes his central nervous system to wear out. This can be a very long time if his circulatory system is kept functioning.
But the citizen cannot take more out of the organ banks than goes into them. He must do his utmost to see that they are supplied.
The only feasible method of supplying the organ banks is through execution of criminals.…
A criminal's pirated body can save a dozen lives. There is now no valid argument against capital punishment for any given crime; for all such argument seeks to prove that killing a man does society no good. Hence the citizen, who wants to live as long and as healthily as possible, will vote any crime into a capital crime if the organ banks are short of material.
Cite Earth's capital punishment for false advertising, income tax evasion, air pollution, having children without a license.
The wonder was that it had taken so long to pass these laws.

The hammer has fallen.

Do you know the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel? If you try to read a graphic novel in the sauna, it comes apart. Glue melts; staples don’t.

8) History never repeats itself.

The moral of this story is, anything you don’t understand is dangerous until you do understand it.

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum

He was shaking. A mass verbal attack can do that to a man, can smash his self-respect and set up doubts which remain for hours or days or forever. There are well-developed verbal techniques for many to use against one. You never let the victim speak without interruption; never let him finish a sentence. You interrupt each other so that he can’t quite catch the drift of your arguments, and then he can’t find the flaws. He forgets his rebuttal points because he’s not allowed to put them into words. His only defense is to walk out. If, instead, you throw him out…

She waited for him to explain a universe in which there was so much injustice.

The State has a superfluity of testicles, Peersa said with no particular emphasis.

Ten thousand years wasn't enough...no lifetime was enough, unless you lived it in such a way as to make it enough.

Casual murder, casual suicide, casual crime. Why not? If alternate universes are a reality, then cause and effect are an illusion. The law of averages is a fraud. You can do anything, and one of you will, or did.