Larry Niven Quotes - Page 2

Once every hundred years, the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clean as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won't have to look at it.

The best advice I was ever given was on my twenty-first birthday when my father said, Son, here's a million dollars. Don't lose it.

A civilization has the ethics it can afford

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.

Never be embarrassed or ashamed by anything you choose to write.

For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt. One who marries six times in ten years won't change jobs. One who moves often to serve his company will maintain a stable marriage. A woman chained to one home and family may redecorate frantically or take a lover or go to many costume parties.

Boredom is my worst enemy. It's killed a lot of my friends, but it won't get me. When I get bored, I go risk my life somewhere.

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes.

How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?

There had been a popular joke on Freedom, started by a man named Calder. Looking down from space, he had said, the dominant life forms on Earth were obviously the cereals and other grasses. They occupied all the most desirable and fertile land; and they had tamed insects and animals to care for them. In particular, they had domesticated the bipeds to nurture and cultivate them and to save and plant their seed. Now, watching the farmers, Alex could easily imagine that they were worshiping and genuflecting before their masters.

The value of a thing is what that thing will bring. -Legal Maxim

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

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.

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.

Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.

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

Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.

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

Anything that can go wrong, will

I do not believe they've run out of surprises.

The witnessing of titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal.

As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.

I am trying to prevent a bloodbath. Is that clear enough for you? I'm trying to prevent a civil war that could kill half the people in this world.

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