Larry Niven Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.

Larry Niven
The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.

Larry Niven
I knew it long ago: I'm a compulsive teacher, but I can't teach. The godawful state of today's education system isn't what's stopping me. I lack at least two of the essential qualifications.
I cannot "suffer fools gladly." The smartest of my pupils would get all my attention, and the rest would have to fend for themselves. And I can't handle being interrupted.
Writing is the answer. Whatever I have to teach, my students will select themselves by buying the book. And nobody interrupts a printed page.

Larry Niven
Matthew Leiah Keller sat beneath a watershed tree and brooded. Other children played all around him, but they ignored Matt. So did two teachers on monitor duty. People usually ignored Matt when he wanted to be alone.
Uncle Matt was gone. Gone to a fate so horrible that the adults wouldn't even talk about it.

Larry Niven
I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on.

Larry Niven
I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.

Larry Niven
Louis knew a few xenophobes, and regarded them as dolts.

Larry Niven
But... watching Steven Barnes taught me to treat my life like an art form.

Larry Niven
Never be embarrassed or ashamed about anything you choose to write. (Think of this before you send it to a market)

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

Larry Niven
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
Giving up freedom for security has begun to look naive.
Even to me. Many of you were ahead of me on this — Three out of four hijacked airplanes destroyed the World Trade Center and a piece of the Pentagon in 2001. How is it possible that those planes were taken using only five perps armed with knives? It was possible because all those hundreds of passengers had been carefully stripped of every possible weapon. We may want to reconsider this approach. It doesn't work in high schools either.

Larry Niven
There were organ banks all over the world, inadequately supplied by people kind enough to will their bodies to medical science.
How useful is the body of a man who dies of old age? How fast can you reach a car accident? And in 2043, Arkansas, which had never rescinded the death penalty, made the organ banks the official state method of execution.
The idea had spread like wildfire.... like a moral plague, as one critic of the time had put it.

Larry Niven
It does not destroy matter, which is reassuring. Rewriting one law of physics is worse than trying to eat one peanut.

Larry Niven
He was sick of having to be afraid. It was a situation to drive a man right out of his skull. If he stopped being afraid, even for an instant, he could be killed! But now, at least for the moment, he could stop listening for footsteps, stop trying to look in all directions at once. A sonic stunner was a surer bet than a hypothetical, undependable psi power. It was real, cold and hard in his hand.

Larry Niven
"You look like a girl with a secret," Matt said. "I think it must be the smile."
She moved closer to him, which was very close, and lowered her voice. "Can you keep a secret?"
Matt smiled with one side of his mouth to show that he knew what was coming. She said it anyway. "So can I."

Larry Niven
Anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do understand it.

Larry Niven
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.

Larry Niven
Cheap superconductors imply maglev trains everywhere. Computers could get big again, with RAM/ROM rising by powers of forty and fifty, if superconductors shed the heat.
Laser handguns against superconducting armor. I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.

Larry Niven
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
Seen through the glow of a building orgasm, a woman seems to blaze with angelic glory.

Larry Niven
The bleeding-heart symbol does not represent any known revolutionary organization. … Yes, the bleeding heart was something else again. A gruesome symbol on a vivarium floor. Fingers that broke without their owner noticing. An ink drawing appearing from nowhere on a dossier cover, like a signature. A signature.

Larry Niven
Mother Nature doesn't care if you're having fun.

Larry Niven
The Gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.

Larry Niven
The perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum. The universe is hostile.

Larry Niven
Think before you make the coward's choice. Old age is not for sissies.

Larry Niven
Stories to end all stories on a given topic, don't.

Larry Niven
A thrint was master over every intelligent beast. This was the Powergiver's primal decree, made before he made the stars. So said all of the twelve thrintun religions, though they fought insanely over other matters.

Larry Niven
It is easier to destroy than create.
Bin Laden tore down the World Trade Center? Let's see him build one. If human beings didn't have a strong preference for creation, nothing would get built, ever.

Larry Niven
A ramrobot had been the first to see Mount Lookitthat. Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds. The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching that of light.

Larry Niven