Larry Niven Quotes

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

In a collaboration, each author will do 75% of the work.

Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.

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

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.

I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles. Of the waters we know nothing.

Fear is the brother of hate.

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

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

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

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

If one must explain a magic trick, one should do so after the show is over.

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

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.

I love superconductors.

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

I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.

Ethics change with technology.

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.