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A civilization has the ethics it can afford

Larry Niven

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Larry Niven
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: April 30
Author
Mathematician
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Laurence van Cott Niven
Afford
Ethics
Civilization

More quotes by Larry Niven

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Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.
Larry Niven
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And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.
Larry Niven
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The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.
Larry Niven
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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.
Larry Niven
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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.
Larry Niven
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I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.
Larry Niven
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Everything starts as somebody's daydream.
Larry Niven
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Mother Nature doesn't care if you're having fun.
Larry Niven
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If one must explain a magic trick, one should do so after the show is over.
Larry Niven
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Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.
Larry Niven
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We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.
Larry Niven
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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.
Larry Niven
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We learn only to ask more questions.
Larry Niven
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Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.
Larry Niven
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In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Larry Niven
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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.
Larry Niven
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I don't have a strong interest in history.
Larry Niven
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Stupidity is always a capital crime.
Larry Niven
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There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads and the fuggheads will get all the press.
Larry Niven
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Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.
Larry Niven