Larry Niven Quotes
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I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.
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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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Sometimes there’s no point in giving up.
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6) Everybody talks first draft.
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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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'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 love superconductors.
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Forget the infinities: Concentrate on detail.
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2) Never fire a laser at a mirror.
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The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.
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Louis knew a few xenophobes, and regarded them as dolts.
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We learn only to ask more questions.
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Treat your life like something to be sculpted.
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'Perhaps I was expecting too much.''Perhaps. We’re all waiting as fast as we can.'
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Putting a monkey wrench in machinery is often the only way to force somebody to repair, replace, or redesign the machinery. Especially legal or social machinery.
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To witness titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal.
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Drugs: 'There’s no way to keep them from getting in. Anyone who wants drugs can get them. We make arrests where we can, and so what? Me, I’m betting on Darwin.''How do you mean?''The next generation won’t use drugs because they’ll be descended from people who had better sense.'
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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.
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19) Think before you make the coward's choice. Old age is not for sissies.
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'You look like a girl with a secret,' Matt said. 'I think it must be the smile.' She moved closer to him, which was very close, and lowered her voice. 'Can you keep a secret?' Matt smiled with one side of his mouth to show that he knew what was coming. She said it anyway. 'So can I.'
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A machine has no mind to read; you never know when it’s going to betray you-
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Jesus Pietro was worried. The Sons of Earth, if they got this far, would go straight to the vivarium to free their compatriots. But if Matthew Keller was his own agent... If the ghost of Alpha Plateau was not a rebel, but a thing with its own unpredictable purpose... Jesus Pietro worried.
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In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.
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3) Stories to end all stories on a given topic, don't.