Larry Niven Quotes

Stupidity is always a capital crime.

When you trade among the stars, there is no repeat business.

A species that can’t develop spaceflight is no better than animals.

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

Presently she gave her considered opinion. “Idiots.”
“No. They’re just like all of us: They want something for nothing.”

The trouble with sharing too many beds was that one’s chance of running into a really bad situation was improved almost to certainty.

“Do you like strange places and faraway people—or vice versa?”
“Both.”

Talking to the Council would be like shouting obscenities at a forest fire.

Drugs: “There’s no way to keep them from getting in. Anyone who wants drugs can get them. We make arrests where we can, and so what? Me, I’m betting on Darwin.”
“How do you mean?”
“The next generation won’t use drugs because they’ll be descended from people who had better sense.”

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.

There’s always another problem behind the one you just solved. Does that mean that you should stop solving problems?

Once the ocean teamed with life, Svetz thought. Now the continental shelf is as dead as the moon: nothing but bubble cities. Once this whole continent was all forest and living desert and fresh water. We cut down the trees and shot the animals and poisoned to the rivers and irrigated the deserts so that even the desert life died; and now there’s nothing left but the food yeast and us.
We’ve forgotten so much about the past that we can’t separate legend from fact. We’ve wiped out most of the forms of life on earth in the last fifteen hundred years, and changed the composition of the air to the extent that we’d be afraid to change it back.
I fear the unknown beasts of the past. I cannot breathe the air. I do not know the edible plants. I could not kill the animals for food. I do not know which would kill me.
The earth’s past is as alien to me as another planet.

But the horse ran on, daring Svetz with its eyes.
How to describe such motion? Svetz had never seen ballet. He knew how machinery moved, and this wasn’t it. All he could think of was a man and a woman making love. Slippery-smooth rhythmic motion, absolute single-minded purpose, motion for the pleasure of motion. It was terrible in its beauty, the flight of the horse.

Any time seems long when you need to make a decision but can’t.

Was he deadpan because he didn’t care anymore? How much boredom can you meet in three hundred years?