Larry Niven Quotes

On a world built to ordered specification, there was no logical reason for such a mountain to exist. Yet every world should have at least one unclimbable mountain.

Everything starts as somebody's dream.

It's very difficult for a black man to get out of South-Central Los Angeles, and get out civilized....The only men I know who have escaped, all began reading Robert Heinlein at age ten.

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.

"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."

Louis suggested that the ship be called 'Lying Bastard'. For their own reasons, Teela and Speaker agreed. For his own reason, Nessus did not object.

Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.

We’re in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.

The puppeteer unrolled completely. 'Did I hear you call me cute?

Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.

Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles. Of the waters we know nothing...

This place is a playground for a questing mind.

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.

Some amiably deranged science-fiction writer had come up with it forty years back and, like so many of his kind, given it away for free - or anyway at fifty cents a word.

...sometimes the only way to call attention to bad construction was to set fire to the building.