Larry Niven citations

Page 2

“Cela doit être très intéressant d'appartenir à une race où les deux sexes sont pensants.”

“Je peux aider ta planète, Louis. Tes semblables connaissent peu de chose de leur sexualité.”

“La perversité de l'univers tend vers un maximum. L'univers est hostile.”

“La chaleur est un des déchets que produit la civilisation.”

“2) Never fire a laser at a mirror.”

“9) Ethics change with technology.”

“There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.”

“A civilization has the ethics it can afford”

“A machine has no mind to read; you never know when it’s going to betray you”

“As I said, it was inevitable, and I don’t let laws of nature upset me.”

“We learn only to ask more questions.”

““It’s a nitwit idea.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you’ve got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked.””

“2) Never be embarrased or ashamed about anything you choose to write. (Think of this before you send it to a market)”

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

“6) Everybody talks first draft.”

“"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."”

“Stupidity is always a capital crime.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.””

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”