Larry Niven Quotes

Engineers. You had to love them. (The alternative was strangling them, and he didn’t want that catching on.)

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.

Allen, it puzzles me that a man can shoot thirty-two full-grown men and women before the sheriff’s men gun him down. You’re more his time, maybe you can tell me. Why didn’t someone just shoot the son of a bitch?

Nothing that works is silly.

Seen through the glow of a building orgasm, a woman seems to blaze with angelic glory.

In fantasy, more than in other forms of literature, the obligation is to teach something universally true about the human condition.

Nice to know that he had the gods on his side. Better make sure the lawyers were there, too.

As I said, it was inevitable, and I don’t let laws of nature upset me.

Must have been bad when the gods were alive, though. They might grant your prayer, they might grant your enemy’s, but they’d certainly grant their own. A god’s wishes wouldn’t have anything to do with what human beings wanted.

In certain video games, it is impossible to win. All you can do is survive as long as you can, piling up points, until you are eventually dragged down and killed.
Much like life itself?

There’s a fine line between sensible emotional restraint, and the withdrawal symptoms of a stimulus junkie denied her fix.

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.

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Was he deadpan because he didn’t care anymore? How much boredom can you meet in three hundred years?

I'll have to get over this sooner or later, Louis thought. Why not now? A friend had taught him this cantrip, this bit of magic for recovering from shock or grief. Sometimes it worked.