Larry Niven Quotes

“We go and pray! Gods must help,” Alura said almost calmly.
“Have they ever helped before?” Max asked hopefully.
“No.” Her shaggy blond head gave a mournful wag. Then she smiled ingenuously. “But maybe we pray wrong!”

"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." Cargill

For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt.

The Gamers are so out of touch with reality that they were never considered a serious threat.

“For letting us examine their silly records they want to charge us a flat million marks!”
“Pay it.”
“It’s robbery.”
“A Belter says that? Why don’t you have records on Mars?”
“We were never interested. What for?”
“What about abstract knowledge?”
“Another word for useless.”
“Then what makes you want useless knowledge enough to pay a million marks for it?”
Slowly Nick matched his grin. “It’s still robbery. How in Finagle’s name did Earth know they’d need to know about Mars?”
“That’s the secret of abstract knowledge. You get in the habit of finding out everything you can about everything. Most of it gets used sooner or later.”

I had to grin. Morris was shocked and horrified. I’d shown him a brand new sin.

And the air was full of the smell of burning bridges.

I want a scotch and water. If I can’t have that, leave out the water.

Sweet reason and solid judgment and philosophical resignation, these were not common among sorcerers.

You don’t stop planning just because there’s no hope.

He kept the gun in his hand. It felt good. He was sick of having to be afraid. It was a situation to drive a man right out of his skull. If he stopped being afraid, even for an instant, he could be killed! But now, at least for the moment, he could stop listening for footsteps, stop trying to look in all directions at once. A sonic stunner was a surer bet than a hypothetical, undependable psi power. It was real, cold and hard in his hand.

“Perhaps I was expecting too much.”
“Perhaps. We’re all waiting as fast as we can.”

Nuclear is the safest power source we’ve got—with two exceptions, neither of which is being built. If some folk are terrified of unseen death by radiation, then let ’em deal with their own neuroses, instead of forcing us to stop building the atomic plants.

GREAT SKY WOMAN and SHADOW VALLEY, adventures set 30,000 years

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