Larry Niven citations Page 2

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

Citations de ses romans, L'Anneau-Monde, 1970

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

Citations de ses romans, L'Anneau-Monde, 1970

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

Citations de ses romans, L'Anneau-Monde, 1970

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

Citations de ses romans, L'Anneau-Monde, 1970

“That's the thing about people who think they hate computers … What they really hate are lousy programmers.”

Citations de ses romans, L'Anneau-Monde, 1970

Larry Niven: Citations en anglais

“2) Never fire a laser at a mirror.”

Larry Niven livre Oath of Fealty

Oath of Fealty (1982) (co-written with Jerry Pournelle)

“9) Ethics change with technology.”

Niven's Laws

“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'.”

Larry Niven livre N-Space

Niven's Laws
Source: N-Space

“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.”

Larry Niven livre World of Ptavvs

Source: World of Ptavvs (1966), p. 6

“We learn only to ask more questions.”

Larry Niven livre The Mote in God's Eye

Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 47 “Homeward Bound” (p. 445)

““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.””

Larry Niven livre The Ringworld Engineers

Source: The Ringworld Engineers (1980), p. 59

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

Larry Niven livre The Mote in God's Eye

Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 18 “The Stone Beehive” (p. 157)

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

Niven's Laws, Niven's Laws For Writers

“6) Everybody talks first draft.”

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

“"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."”

Niven's Laws, Niven's Laws For Writers

“Stupidity is always a capital crime.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

Source: Ringworld (1970), p. 314

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

Larry Niven livre The Mote in God's Eye

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

“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 livre The Mote in God's Eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scatterbrain (2003), p. 26

“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.”

Niven's Laws

“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.””

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

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

Larry Niven livre Flash Crowd

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

“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.”

Niven's Laws, Niven's Laws For Writers

“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.”

Source: Ringworld (1970), p. 152

“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.”

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

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

Larry Niven livre 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)

“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 livre Flatlander

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