Larry Niven: Trending quotes

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Larry Niven: 276 quotes3 likes

“Jesus Pietro wasn't used to dealing with ghosts.
It would require brand new techniques.
Grimly he set out to evolve them.”

Larry Niven

Source: A Gift From Earth (1968), Ch. 8 : Polly's Eyes

“6) Everybody talks first draft.”

Larry Niven

Niven's Laws, Niven's Laws For Writers

“"I'm no historian," said Harry. "But morals are morals. What's unethical here and now is unethical anywhere, anytime."
"Kane, you're wrong. It is ethical to execute a man for theft?"
"Of course."
"Did you know that there was once a vastly detailed science of rehabilitation for criminals? It was a branch of psychology, naturally, but it was by far the largest such branch. By the middle of century twenty-one, nearly two-thirds of all criminals could eventually be released as cured."
"That's silly. Why go to all that trouble when the organ banks must have been crying for — Oh. I see. No organ banks."”

Larry Niven

Source: A Gift From Earth (1968), Ch. 10 : Parlette's Hand

“Stupidity is always a capital crime.”

Larry Niven

The Fourth Profession (p. 183)
Short fiction, A Hole in Space (1974)

“Millard Parlette was near exhaustion. … Sometimes it seemed to him, that he was at the end of his life, that he'd waited just long enough to meet this — the crisis he'd foreseen a hundred years ago. … Known rebels moved freely through the Hospital, and no one could touch them. Their attitude toward the police was rude and contemptuous. Rumor had it that Millard Parlette was drafting new laws to further restrict police power. It didn't help that the rumors were true.”

Larry Niven

Source: A Gift From Earth (1968), Ch. 14 : Balance Of Power

“Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.”

Larry Niven

Source: Ringworld (1970), p. 314

“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.”

Larry Niven book The Mote in God's Eye

Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 3 “Dinner Party” (p. 31)

“Rod privately suspected the Scots studied their speech off duty so they’d be unintelligible to the rest of humanity.”

Larry Niven book The Mote in God's Eye

Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 2 “The Passengers” (p. 15)

“There was this about him: he knew who I was, but he hadn’t remembered my name. Ron Cole had better things to think about than what name belonged with whom. A name was only a tag and a conversational gambit.”

Larry Niven

Cloak of Anarchy (p. 115)
Short fiction, Tales of Known Space (1975)

“Gambling was safer than war. More fun, too. Best of all, it gave him better odds.”

Larry Niven

Source: Short fiction, Tales of Known Space (1975), There Is a Tide (p. 208)

“The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.”

Larry Niven

Scatterbrain (2003), p. 26

“5) Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.”

Larry Niven

Niven's Laws

“We follow the scientists around and look over their shoulders. They're watching their feet: provable mistakes are bad for them. We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes.”

Larry Niven

On the relationship between science and science-fiction.
Space.com interview (2000)

“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.””

Larry Niven book Flash Crowd

Flash Crowd, section 9, in Three Trips in Time and Space (1973), edited by Robert Silverberg, p. 77

“4) It is a sin to waste the reader's time.”

Larry Niven

Niven's Laws, Niven's Laws For Writers

“One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better.”

Larry Niven

Source: Ringworld (1970), p. 152

“Jesus Pietro was worried. The Sons of Earth, if they got this far, would go straight to the vivarium to free their compatriots. But if Matthew Keller was his own agent… If the ghost of Alpha Plateau was not a rebel, but a thing with its own unpredictable purpose…
Jesus Pietro worried.”

Larry Niven

Source: A Gift From Earth (1968), Ch. 10 : Parlette's Hand

“And that’s another reason I don’t want contact between your species and mine. You’re all Crazy Eddies. You think every problem has a solution.”

Larry Niven book The Mote in God's Eye

Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 37 “History Lesson” (p. 370; spoken by an alien to an earthman)

“Anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do understand it.”

Larry Niven book Flatlander

"Flatlander" (1967), first published in If (March 1967)

“Here is where the predictions failed: We didn't take Cargo Cult mentality into account: "if somebody has something I don't, he must have stolen it."
We didn't understand how good we could get at communication — when you have something that someone else doesn't, the whole damn planet knows it.”

Larry Niven

Space.com interview (2000)