Larry Niven Quotes

The priest splayed his digits wide. “Herdmaster, I learn. Later I will speak.” “You do not seem pleased.” There was no answer. “A place of puzzles,” Pastempeh-keph said. “They surrender and have not surrendered. Their tapes show rogues acting in collusion. They live neither in herds nor alone. What are they?” “What do they believe themselves to be?” Fistarteh-thuktun asked. “Perhaps that is more important.

Parlette, if you have something to say, say it. If we jump to the wrong conclusions, please assume that you’re expressing yourself badly, and don’t try to shift the blame.

What’s the justification for ancestor worship? You know what happens to a man without modern geriatrics: as he ages his brain cells start to die. Yet people tend to respect him, to listen to him.

Our society depends entirely on its technology. Change the technology, and you change the society. Most especially you change the ethics.

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

Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.

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

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

We've fallen way behind. Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.

Ethics change with technology.

For two hundred and fifty years the kzinti had not attacked human space. They had nothing to attack with. For two hundred and fifty years men had not attacked the kzinti worlds; and no kzin could understand it. Men confused them terribly.

Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He'd packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization.

Everybody was talking and nobody was communicating.

“That’s impossible. Isn’t it? Carlos?”
Carlos’ mouth twisted. “Not if it’s being done.”

We play your part in order to understand you, but you each seem to play a thousand parts. It makes things difficult for an honest, hard-working bug-eyed monster.