Larry Niven Quotes

Do you know the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel? If you try to read a graphic novel in the sauna, it comes apart. Glue melts; staples don’t.

WHY WARS DON’T STOP
Then who can end a war? The leaders of embattled nations? They aren’t bleeding, except by proxy. It’s only their own imaginations that make war different from a complex chess game.
The citizens at home? They are usually assured that they are winning, or that the enemy are inhuman monsters, or that to lose would be annihilation, or all of the above.
Aside from all this, surrender is dishonorable. This is only partly an ethical judgment. It feels dishonorable. Nobody fakes a surrender reflex without cost. Surrender is losing a fight, and we aren’t wired to take that lightly. All of evolution is against losing casually, for trout as well as men.
Wars continue because there is nobody who can end them. WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT
You can’t do anything about it.

It doesn’t take brains to mate!

Infantry, which means killing on foot and doesn’t have anything to do with children.

A sapient species doesn’t reach space unless the members learn to cooperate. They’ll wreck the environment, one way or another, war or straight libertarianism or overbreeding.

Heinlein spun off ideas at a terrific rate. Other writers picked them up…along with a distrust for arrogance combined with stupidity or ignorance, particularly in politicians.

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?

There aren’t many prizes for second place in battle.

Collaborations are unnatural. The writer is a jealous god. He builds his universe without interference. He resents the carping of mentally deficient critics, and the editor’s capricious demands for revisions. Let two writers try to make one universe, and their defenses get in the way.

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

“But there’s an old legend,” I said. “Once every hundred years the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clear as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won’t have to look at it.”

Casual murder, casual suicide, casual crime. Why not? If alternate universes are a reality, then cause and effect are an illusion. The law of averages is a fraud. You can do anything, and one of you will, or did.

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

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

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.