Larry Niven Quotes
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I don't have a strong interest in history.
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Stupidity is always a capital crime.
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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.
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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!
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I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on.
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We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.
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She waited for him to explain a universe in which there was so much injustice.
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8) History never repeats itself.
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I've spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.
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To witness titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal.
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19) Think before you make the coward's choice. Old age is not for sissies.
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Sometimes there’s no point in giving up.
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Louis knew a few xenophobes, and regarded them as dolts.
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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.
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3) Stories to end all stories on a given topic, don't.
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'It’s a nitwit idea.''Yes, sir.''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.'
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I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.
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Forget the infinities: Concentrate on detail.
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Anyone who says human nature can’t be changed is out of his head. To make it stick, he’s got to define human nature-and he can’t.
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Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.
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Jesus Pietro wasn't used to dealing with ghosts. It would require brand new techniques. Grimly he set out to evolve them.
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A ramrobot had been the first to see Mount Lookitthat. Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds. The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching that of light.
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Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.
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6) It is easier to destroy than create. Bin Laden tore down the World Trade Center? Let's see him build one. If human beings didn't have a strong preference for creation, nothing would get built, ever.