Quotes by Larry Niven

“Fear is the brother of hate.”

“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”

“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.”

“There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that ev...”

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

“I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to wo...”

“Mother Nature doesn't care if you're having fun. ”

“Never fire a laser at a mirror. ”

“Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic ...”

“Ethics change with technology.”

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

“The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.”

“Never tell a computer to forget it.”

“Each nugget of information was fascinating. The world was full of new-found marvels and he wanted to share the excitement with everybody. They all did. They had a certain sense. It wasn't a sense o...”

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

“Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.”

“The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.”

“We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.”

“I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.”

“On a world built to ordered specification, there was no logical reason for such a mountain to exist. Yet every world should have at least one unclimbable mountain.”