Top 200 Liu Cixin Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “If so, I’ll just hold the umbrella up for you forever.”

— Liu Cixin

52. “Young people are all the same. The more books you read, the more confused you become.”

— Liu Cixin

53. “To love humanity, you must start by loving individual persons, by fulfilling your responsibility to those you love.”

— Liu Cixin

54. “Life needed smoothness, but it also needed direction. One could not always be returning to the point of origin.”

— Liu Cixin

55. “The weapons attacking her were a diverse mix: antiques such as American carbines, Czech-style machine guns, Japanese Type-38 rifles; newer weapons such as standard-issue People’s Liberation Army rifles and submachine guns, stolen from the PLA after the publication of the “August Editorial”; and even a few Chinese dadao swords and spears.”

— Liu Cixin

56. “Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind.”

— Liu Cixin

57. “I read it when I was a kid. Shanghai’s about to fall into the ocean, and a group of people go house to house seizing life preservers and then destroying them en masse, for the sole purpose of making sure that no one would live if everyone couldn’t. I remember in particular there was one little girl who took the group to the door of one house and cried out, ‘They still have one!”

— Liu Cixin

58. “In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”

— Liu Cixin

59. “The past was like a handful of sand you thought you were squeezing tightly, but which had already run out through the cracks between your fingers.”

— Liu Cixin

60. “Most people would have difficulty explaining how they know two and two make four.”

— Liu Cixin

61. “Each star was like a distant eye blinking at the human world from the depths of the universe.”

— Liu Cixin

62. “When the Earth, an artificial satellite, and the sun are in a straight line, the line of sight from the ground-based antenna to the satellite will have the sun as its background. The sun is a giant source of electromagnetic radiation, and, as a result, satellite transmissions to the ground will be overwhelmed by interference from the solar radiation. This problem could not be completely solved, even in the twenty-first century.”

— Liu Cixin

63. “She was like a star, always so distant. Even the light she shone on me was always cold.”

— Liu Cixin

64. “Science fiction is a literature of possibilities.”

— Liu Cixin

65. “Everyone is afraid of something. The enemy must be, too. The more powerful they are, the more they have to lose to their fears.”

— Liu Cixin

66. “He lacked the ability to thrive in society, but also the resources to ignore it. All he could do was hang on to the edge, suffering.”

— Liu Cixin

67. “Now, faced with political cases like yours, all prosecutorial organs and courts would rather be too severe than too lax. This is because treating you too severely would just be a mistake in method, but treating you too laxly would be a mistake in political direction.”

— Liu Cixin

68. “Keep the fire low.”

— Liu Cixin

69. “As soon as we increase the dimensionality of this proton, it will become very small.”

— Liu Cixin

70. “Emancipation of human nature inevitably brings with it scientific and technological progress.”

— Liu Cixin

71. “The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.”

— Liu Cixin

72. “Mom, I’m going to be a firefly.”

— Liu Cixin

73. “A woman should be like water, able to flow over and around anything.”

— Liu Cixin

74. “The physics principles behind the three-body problem28 are very simple. It’s mainly a math problem.”

— Liu Cixin

75. “Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!”

— Liu Cixin

76. “Unlike other human religions, they worshipped something that truly existed. Also unlike other human religions, it was the Lord who was in crisis, and the duty of salvation fell on the shoulders of the believer.”

— Liu Cixin

77. “Outside the ship, the thin membrane of space-time rippled with the gravitational waves, like a placid lake surface disturbed by a night breeze. The judgment of death for both worlds spread across the cosmos at the speed of light.”

— Liu Cixin

78. “That’s right. Five minutes into the all-hands meeting, the fundamental values of this totalitarian society had received the support of the vast majority of the crew. So, let me tell you, when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism. Boris.”

— Liu Cixin

79. “During research conducted with the neuroscientist Keiko Yamasuki, he discovered that brain activity for thoughts and memories operated on the quantum level rather than on the molecular level as previously believed.”

— Liu Cixin

80. “To work in fundamental theory, one must be stupid.”

— Liu Cixin

81. “Anything sufficiently weird must be fishy.”

— Liu Cixin

82. “The fish responsible for drying the sea are not here.”

— Liu Cixin

83. “If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?”

— Liu Cixin

84. “The false alarm was the result of the explosive amplifying effects of a hyper-information society when fed sensitive news.”

— Liu Cixin

85. “We’ll send only a brain,” he said.”

— Liu Cixin

86. “As he spoke, he looked up and once again saw Zhang Beihai’s steady gaze, which revealed a determination that warmed his heart a little. Zhang Beihai, I know you have faith. With a father like that, it would be impossible for you not to. But things are definitely not as simple as you say. I don’t know what you base your faith on, and I don’t even know what else your faith encompasses. Just like your father. I admired him, but I have to admit that in the end I couldn’t figure him out. Chang.”

— Liu Cixin

87. “I want to tell all those who believe in God that I am not the Chosen One. I also want to tell all the atheists that I am not a history-maker. I am but an ordinary person. Unfortunately, I have not been able to walk the ordinary person’s path. My path is, in reality, the journey of a civilization.”

— Liu Cixin

88. “The fundamental axiom of economics is the human mercenary instinct. Without.”

— Liu Cixin

89. “You are standing at the foot of the mountain. We are all always at the foot. The speed of light is the foot of a mountain; the three dimensions of space are the foot of a mountain. You are imprisoned in the deep gorge of light-speed and three- dimensional space. Does it not feel... cramped?”

— Liu Cixin

90. “By the time you’re my age, you’ll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much turns out to mean very little.”

— Liu Cixin

91. “Earth was treated as a knowledge battery: After it was charged fully with Trisolaran knowledge, it would provide more power.”

— Liu Cixin

92. “I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.”

— Liu Cixin

93. “But I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”

— Liu Cixin

94. “The universal laws of physics are the most terrifying weapons, and also the most effective defenses.”

— Liu Cixin

95. “Exponentials are the devils of mathematics.”

— Liu Cixin

96. “Like those proverbial bookish men who could not even tell types of grains apart, they do not labor with their hands, and know nothing practical. They.”

— Liu Cixin

97. “The universe is a hollow sphere floating in the middle of a sea of fire. There are numerous tiny holes in the surface of the sphere, as well as a large one. The light from the sea of flames shines through these holes. The tiny ones are stars, and the large one is the sun.”

— Liu Cixin

98. “Human civilization now possessed a mirror in the universe, through which humanity gained a new understanding of itself through a novel perspective.”

— Liu Cixin

99. “The child that was human civilization had opened the door to her home and glanced outside. The endless night terrified her so much that she shuddered against the expansive and profound darkness, and shut the door firmly.”

— Liu Cixin

100. “The humanism of Earth will lead many Trisolarans onto the wrong path. Just as Trisolaran civilization has already become a religion on Earth, Earth civilization has this potential on Trisolaris.”

— Liu Cixin