Ringworld quotes
Erik Max Francis
from _Ringworld_ and _The Ringworld Engineers,_ by Larry Niven,
and _The Ringworld RPG_ by Chaosium, Inc.
The Ringworld is an engineering compromise between a Dyson Sphere and
a normal planet.
The conviction of wisdom
is the plague of man.
Montaigne
The world that never mankind hath possessed.
Dante
_Inferno,_ XXVI
I sometimes wonder what our human lives would be like if we were not,
as we are, creatures of fear.
P. Spong
_Mind in the Waters_
We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes
-- we have no wish to find them alike.
Pascal
Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all
the past is somehow grown dim.
Starbuck
_Moby Dick_
The Power separates Thrint from Animal.
Covenants without the swords are but words.
Camden
Louis Wu, I found your challenge verbose. In challenging a kzin, a
simple scream of range is sufficient. You scream and you leap.
Speaker-to-Animals
_Ringworld_
If you can heat some bourbon, I can drink it. If you cannot heat it,
I can still drink it.
Speaker-to-Animals
_Ringworld_
A mad puppeteer, a full grown kzin, and me. Our fourth crew member
had better be a psychiatrist.
Louis Wu
_Ringworld_
Exercise is wonderful. I could sit and watch it all day.
Louis Wu
_Ringworld_
I did some writing once, but it turned out to be hard work, which was
the last thing I expected.
Louis Wu
_Ringworld_
The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable
fools.
_Ringworld_
You can learn a lot about a world by looking at its underside.
Louis Wu
_Ringworld_
To witness titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and
often fatal.
Nessus
_Ringworld_
On a world built to ordered specification, there was no logical reason
for such a mountain [as Fist-of-God] to exist. Yet every world should
have at least one unclimbable mountain.
_Ringworld_
Remember the Finagle laws. The peversity of the universe tends toward
a maximum. The universe is hostile.
Louis Wu
_Ringworld_
What is it that shapes a species?
Louis Wu
_Ringworld_
The universe is against me. . . . The universe makes no provision for
a two-hundred-year-old man.
Louis Wu
_Ringworld_
Dante's universe had been a complex artifact, with the souls of men
and angels shown as precisely machined parts of the vast structure.
The Ringworld was obtrusively an artifact, a _made_ thing. You
couldn't forget it, not for an instant; for the handle rose overhead,
huge and blue and checkered, from beyond the edge of infinity.
_Ringworld_
One mark of a good officer was the ability to make quick decisions.
If they happened to be right, so much the better . . .
Louis Wu
_Ringworld_
Sky and earth were two flat plates, infinitely wide, pressed together;
and men were microbes crawling between the plates . . .
_Ringworld_
A man can lose his soula mong the stars. Much later, he may realize
that his body acted for him, guiding his ship while his mind traveled
in realms he cannot remember. They call it _the far look._ It is
dangerous. A man's soul does not always return.
_Ringworld_
Did you know that _naked_ once meant the same thing as _unprotected_?
Louis Wu
_Ringworld_
You amaze me. No known sentient species copulates as often as you do.
Go, then. Use caution where you sit. Remember that unfamiliar life-
forms are about.
Nessus (to Louis Wu and Teela Brown)
_Ringworld_
Some mistakes we must carry with us.
Speaker-to-Animals
_Ringworld_
It didn't matter. Not when all mistakes could be left behind at
twelve hundred miles per hour.
_Ringworld_
A docile kzin. You sought to produce a docile kzin, Nessus. If you
think you have produced a docile kzin, come and rejoin us.
Speaker-to-Animals
_Ringworld_
Teela, you did not complain when you learned that puppeteers had
manipulated the heredity of my race. They sought to produce a docile
kzin. . . . You gloated that this crime was to the benefit of your
species. Now you complain. Why?
Speaker-to-Animals
_Ringworld_
Time was different when the sun was always straight overhead. Morning
and afternoon were identical. Decisions seemed less than permanent.
Reality seemed less than real. It was . . . like the instant of time
spent traveling between transfer booths.
_Ringworld_
Louis Wu was alone in the universe, and the universe was a plaything
for Louis Wu. The most important question in the universe became: Is
Louis Wu satisfied with himself?
_Ringworld_
Monkey curiosity was not powerful in most sentient species.
_Ringworld_
There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one
could run away from problems.
_Ringworld_
Finagle's law, how much there was to find! Strange life. . . .
Sunflowers. . . . Floating cities. . . . Bandersnatchi. . . . And
death? Death was always the same, everywhere.
_Ringworld_
Civilization tends to spread, if there's a transport system to spread
it.
Louis Wu
_Ringworld_
Maybe fear was in a puppeteer's genes. But in a human being fear had
to be learned.
_Ringworld_
They were puppets! Huge and dark and sentient, the Puppet Master
twitched their arms and their legs and moved them about to an unseen
script. And Louis Wu knew the Puppet Master's name. _The luck of
Teela Brown._
_Ringworld_
We'll have to make our own luck from now on.
Louis Wu
_Ringworld_
The Fall of the Cities had left a few survivors. Some were mad. All
took the life-extending compound if they could get it. All were
looking for enclaves of civilization. None had thought to build his
own.
_Ringworld_
And so I will live to see another sunset.
Speaker-to-Animals
_Ringworld_
This formation [Fist-of-God] was not known to me. Why was it built?
At the rim there are mountains as high, as decorative, and more
useful, for they hold back the air.
Halrloprillalar Hotrufan
_Ringworld_
It does not disturb me to play a god. It disturbs me to play a god
badly.
Speaker-to-Animals
_Ringworld_
-- And they were through. There wasn't any pass. There was only a
broken eggshell of Ringworld foundation material, stressed by terrific
stresses to a few feet of thickness; and beyond that, the crater in
Fist-of-God Mountain.
They were falling. And the crater was full of stars.
_Ringworld_
Speaker-to-Animals: We can't go back, Louis.
Louis Wu: No, of course not.
Speaker-to-Animals: Not until we can deliver our secret to our
respective worlds. And acquire an intact ship.
_Ringworld_
To kidnap a kzin is probably a mistake.
Chmeee
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Uneasy sits the butt that bears the boss.
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Scars are like memories. We do not have them removed.
Chmeee
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Could any thinking being ever have claimed to be an expert on the
Ringworld?
_The Ringworld Engineers_
What do you call huge? On the Ringworld?
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
What's good besides the wire? Cheese. Sleeping plates. Love
(impractical). Wild skin dye jobs. Freedom, security, self-respect.
. . . Brandy poured in coffee. Movies.
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Making a Bussard ramjet was no task for primitives.
_The Ringworld Engineers_
In principle the Ringworld should have been an endless garden. It was
not a randomly evolved world, after all, but a made thing.
_The Ringworld Engineers_
I'll have to get over this sooner or later. Why not now?
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
He [Louis Wu] had put clothing between himself and a vast and lonely
world. Not modesty, but fear.
_The Ringworld Engineers_
I do hope you are made, Louis. You know too much. You know the world
is a ring, and that is a secret.
Valavirgillin
_The Ringworld Engineers_
The world is doomed to fiery destruction in not many _falans._ Only
Louis Wu can save us.
Kyeref
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Why should we care if you are insane? The activities of other species
rarely interfere with our own lives. In the end, they all belong to
us.
Kyeref
_The Ringworld Engineers_
I'm paranoid. But am I paranoid enough?
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
The Hindmost had a working droud . . . and [Louis Wu] hated hjimself
for wanting it.
_The Ringworld Engineers_
I know this place, I've seen it in a map room! It's the starship
haven, outside this world!
Harkabeeparolyn
_The Ringworld Engineers_
We did it to ourselves, didn't we? My people took the world's
steering motors for our starships. Can I help set that right?
Harkabeeparolyn
_The Ringworld Engineers_
But for the moment, [Louis Wu] would steal a few hours' sleep . . . to
match his other thefts.
_The Ringworld Engineers_
We didn't volunteer for this mission. Kzinti and humans, we make poor
slaves.
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Sometimes it was difficult to remember that the individuals within an
alien species could differ as thoroughly as humans did.
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Every so often I lose it. I think I've accepted it all, and then all
of a sudden it's too big. Too tanj big.
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Tanj! There ain't no justice!
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Mars is missing.
The Hindmost
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Hindmost: The easy way to find out is to accelerate until something
happens.
Louis: I do not _believe_ I heard a Pierson's puppeteer say that.
_The Ringworld Engineers_
The kzinti who had dared that vastness [of the Great Ocean] had not
been cowards, and those who returned had not been fools.
_The Ringworld Engineers_
There is _never_ no hope left. Remember.
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Sometimes there's no point in giving up.
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
You tell him, Daddy! It's safer to eat white arsenic than human meat!
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Chmeee: With such a weapon I could boil the Earth to vapor.
Louis Wu: Shut up.
Chmeee: It was a natural thought, Louis.
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Keep moving. Futz, it won't hurt any less if you stop moving. You've
got to get over this sometime. Why not now?
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Hindmost, [Teela Brown] called you more dangerous than a kzin. A
tactical ploy, to insult us both, no doubt.
Chmeee
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Everyone wants to look good at his own funeral.
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Chmeee: Furthermore, they [kzinti] of the Map of Earth have fulfilled
an ancient daydream of my people.
Louis: Oh?
Chmeee: Conquering Earth, you idiot.
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Hindmost: Will you want a working droud?
Louis Wu: Don't ever ask me that again, okay?
_The Ringworld Engineers_
Kawaresksenjajok, Harkabeeparolyn, shall we check out some legends for
ourselves? And maybe make a few.
Louis Wu
_The Ringworld Engineers_
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Erik Max Francis Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt. Coming soon: UNIVERSE _ | _
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