Larry Niven Quotes

It takes a lot of people to hold civilization together; some of us are only here to ask the right questions.

“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!”

The organ banks would be supplied for years. Not only would the crew have a full supply, which they always did anyway, but there would be spare parts for exceptional servants of the regime; i.e., for civil servants such as Jesus Pietro and his men. Even the colonists would benefit. It was not at all unusual for the Hospital to treat a sick but deserving colonist if the medical supplies were sufficient. The Hospital treated everyone they could. It reminded the colonists that the crew ruled in their name and had their interests at heart.
And the Sons of Earth was dead. All but one man, and from his picture he wasn't old enough to be dangerous.
Nonetheless Jesus Pietro had his picture tacked to the Hospital bulletin boards and sent a copy to the newscast station with the warning that he was wanted for questioning.
It was not until dawn, when he was settling down to sleep, that he remembered who belonged to that face. Matthew Keller's nephew...

Wanted fan for plain sedition, like the singing of this tune. If NASA hadn't failed us we'd have cities on the moon. If it weren't for fucking NASA we'd at least have walked on Mars. If I never can make orbit, then I'll never reach the stars.

"Her eyes glowed. She spoke as if confiding a secret. "Have you noticed the moonlight?

Part of being a coward is wanting security.

A civilization has the ethics it can afford. We

I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base.

And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges.

Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding.

"They used to teach us that evolution of intelligent beings wasn't possible," she said. "Societies protect their weaker members. Civilizations tend to make wheel chairs and spectacles and hearing aids as soon as they have the tools for them. When a society makes war, the men generally have to pass a fitness test before they're allowed, to risk their lives. I suppose it helps win the war." She smiled. "But it leaves precious little room for the survival of the fittest."

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

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

“Last coffee I had was on the tube out from Denver.” He made a face.
Hippogryph was willing. “That bad?”
“Let’s put it this way. I had the concierge send it out to a lab. Got a call back saying ‘Congratulations, your moose is pregnant.’”

It had been a long dull evening, with only the thought of leaving the party early to look forward to.

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

Priests learn to be practical, if their gods don’t.