Quotes from Larry Niven

A civilization has the ethics it can afford

Never tell a computer to forget it.

I asked him, "Do you know the difference between nude and naked?" He shook his head. "Nude is artistic. Naked is defenseless.

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum

The Product of Freedom and Security is a constant (F X S = k). Giving up freedom for security is beginning to look naive.

Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you've got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked.

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

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 every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.

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

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

For two hundred and fifty years the kzinti had not attacked human space. They had nothing to attack with. For two hundred and fifty years men had not attacked the kzinti worlds; and no kzin could understand it. Men confused them terribly.

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

The majority is always sane

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.

The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.   - Robert A. Heinlein

Fear is the brother of hate.

Long ago, Louis Wu had stood at the void edge of Mount Lookitthat. The Long Fall River, on that world, ends in the tallest waterfall in known space. Louis's eyes had followed it down as far as they could penetrate the void mist. The featureless white of the void itself had grasped at his mind, and Louis Wu, half hypnotized, had sworn to live forever. How else could he see all there was to see? Now he reaffirmed that decision.

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

We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.

SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.

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

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.

Fear is the brother of hate.