Larry Niven Quotes

It was a bad omen. Glitches were a lot like cockroaches. If you didn’t catch them in time, they’d scuttle off into someplace dark and warm and begin to breed.

I do not want all critics hanged alongside the lawyers and tax collectors. The good ones serve a purpose.

Government over large areas needs emotional ties. It also needs stability. Government by 50%-plus-one hasn’t enjoyed particularly stable politics—and it lasts only so long as the 50%-minus-one minority is willing to submit. Is heredity a rational way to choose leaders? It has this in its favor: the leader is known from an early age to be destined to rule, and can be educated to the job. Is that preferable to education based on how to get the job? Are elected officials better at governing, or at winning elections?

Suddenly Corbell missed Mirabelle terribly. He mourned her, not because she was dead, but because she was gone.

Human beings are fragile, watery things. Death spells are the easiest magic there is.

There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.

Those who will give up essential liberty to secure a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin

We learn only to ask more questions.

I asked him, “Do you know the difference between nude and naked?”
He shook his head.
“Nude is artistic. Naked is defenseless.”

The value of a thing is what that thing will bring. -Legal Maxim

Louis's excitement was growing unbearable. Was this really what he had needed all along? Not the droud and wire, but the risk of his life to prove its value! Louis adjusted his flying belt and dropped over the railing.

The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of cause.

Cooking was creation itself; It seemed to put the universe in perspective.

“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.”

3) Stories to end all stories on a given topic, don't.