Quotes from Larry Niven

he doesn't have the normal share of miterosis.

But you can't make abortions illegal—you'd just drive poor women to back-alley clinics, while their rich cousins go to nice clean family doctors. That's murder too.

Friends don't reprogram friends, even when they're able.

I think that of the three of us, I alone have no food supply, said the kzin.

She's just what any puppeteer would give his soul to be. She can't be injured.

And they never promoted anybody who could do the math, because anyone who could do enough math to understand physical limits would be opposed to socialism in the first place.

All were looking for enclaves of civilization. None had thought to build his own.

Among the deficiencies common to the Italian and the U.S. postal systems are: - inefficiency, and delays in deliveries - old-fashioned organization - low efficiency and low salaries of personnel - high frequency of strikes - very high operational deficit - Roberto Vacca, The Coming Dark Age

Engineers. You had to love them. (The alternative was strangling them, and he didn't want that catching on.)

Skyscrapers, said Speaker. With so much room on the Ringworld, why build so tall? To prove they can do it. No, that's asinine, said Louis. There'd be no point, if they could build something like the Ringworld itself. Perhaps the tall buildings came later, during the decline of civilization.

Strange. I would have thought that humor was an aspect of intelligence. No. Humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism. All the same— Speaker, no sapient being ever interrupts a defense mechanism.

Softly Louis asked, When did you figure this out? Some time ago. It did not seem important to our survival.

It—it ought to be pretty well closed off for an intelligent species, she said. 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.

widdershins

Alas, he understood too well Sigmund's concept of interesting.

Never fire a laser at a mirror.

In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.

Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!

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.

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.

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

I've spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.

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

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.