Lucifer's Hammer Quotes

“Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.   - Robert A. Heinlein”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“The value of a thing is what that thing will bring. -Legal Maxim”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He'd packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“Johnny, did you ever hear of the Club of Rome?" Johnny had, but the audience would need reminding. "They were the people who did computer simulations to find out how long we could get along on our natural resources. Even with zero population growth—" "They tell us we're finished," Sharps broke in. "And that's stupid. We're only finished because they won't let us really use technology. They say we're running out of metals. There's more metal in one little asteroid than was mined all over the world in the last five years! And there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids. All we have to do is go get 'em." "Can we?" "You bet! Even with the technology we already have, we could do it. Johnny, out there in space it's raining soup, and we don't even know about soup bowls.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“A civilization has the ethics it can afford. We”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“work, whatever it must be, is the service of God and of the community and therefore the expression of man's dignity. - Emil Brunner, Gifford Lectures, 1948”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“God gives all men all earth to love,  But, since man's heart is small, Ordains for each one spot shall prove,  Beloved over all. - Rudyard Kipling”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“Rick laughed. "Yeah. Everybody's gonna start painting their borders in neon orange a mile wide. Then all the college kids will scream about damage to the environment”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection. -H. Poincare”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“been”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“People who wouldn't go near an atomic plant lived downstream from dams.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“pluperfect”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“We tried growing the garden with no sprays, just organic fertilizer, and it wasn't humans that ate most of that crop, it was bugs!”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“Of all states that is the worst whose rulers no longer enjoy an authority sufficiently extensive for everyone to obey them with good grace, but in which their authority over a part of their subjects is sufficiently large to enable them to constrain others. - Bertrand de Jouvenal, Sovereignty”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“furies.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“I used to be responsible to the people of the United States, and particularly to the people of California.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“(Which religious sect was it that required all its members to keep a year's supply of food? They'd been doing that since the Sixties, too.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“Sure, the day they think they can win clean, they'll hit us,”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“He was proud of the .38 on his hip.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“Let's see, parabolic speed at Earth orbit is what, Dan?" "Twenty-nine point seven kilometers per second. Times square root of two." "Forty-two kilometers a second,”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“The Hammer of God was coming to punish the decadent and the willful.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“His hands never shook. John Baker had flown fighters over Hanoi,”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“I will be dipped in shit." "I beg your pardon, Senator?" "I will be dipped in shit." "Oh.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“and get the plant on line, four thousand megawatts of clean electric power when the project was completed.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“And we're going to keep slaves," Delanty said. "Not because we want to. Because we need them. And we used to control the lightning!”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“If you could feel terror, you wanted to live.”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer

“The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability. - Fundamental theorem of information theory”
― Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer