These science fiction quotes will inspire you. Science fiction (sometimes shortened to sci-fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging science fiction quotes, science fiction sayings, and science fiction proverbs.
Best Science Fiction Quotes
- “For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.” ~ Gene Roddenberry
- “Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us.” ~ Isaac Asimov
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“If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
- “Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.” ~ Ray Bradbury
- “One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. …Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don’t know what they’re talking about.” ~ Ray Bradbury
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“No matter what decade science fiction comes from, it’s representing the present.” ~ Don Hertzfeldt
- “Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.” ~ Ray Bradbury
- “I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself “well, that’s not going to happen” ~ Rita Rudner
- “Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” ~ Frank Herbert
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“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” ~ J. G. Ballard
- “Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can’t imagine you are writing about them.” ~ Ray Bradbury
- “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “Science Fiction” … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.” ~ Stephen Hawking
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“Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.” ~ Eric Hoffer
- “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.” ~ Rutger Hauer
- “When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.” ~ Steven Wright
- “FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER. FEAR IS THE LITTLE-DEATH THAT BRINGS TOTAL OBLITERATION.” ~ Frank Herbert , Science fiction quotes about death
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“Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.” ~ Isaac Asimov
- “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” ~ Frank Herbert
- “Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.” ~ Isaac Asimov
- “Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.” ~ Susan Sontag
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“Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.” ~ Doris Lessing
- “Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.” ~ Rod Serling
- “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke , Science fiction quotes about technology
- “The real universe is always one step beyond logic.” ~ Frank Herbert
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“Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “That’s really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have.” ~ Frederik Pohl
- “It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.” ~ Will Shetterly
- “The Force is really a way of feeling; it’s a way of being with life. It really has nothing to do with weapons. The Force gives you the power to have extrasensory perception and to be able to see things and hear things, read minds and levitate things. It is said that certain creatures are born with a higher awareness of the Force than humans. Their brains are different; they have more midi-chlorians in their cells.” ~ George Lucas , Science fiction quotes about life
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“Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.” ~ Philip K. Dick
- “In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory — horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene — and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.” ~ Barbara Ehrenreich
- “Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.” ~ Philip K. Dick
- “To almost no one’s surprise, Astrid said, “Dune, by Frank Herbert. ‘I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that bring total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the Fear has gone there will be nothing.'” She and Lana together spoke the last phrase of the incantation. “‘Only I will remain.” ~ Michael Grant
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“The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.” ~ Joan Didion
- “Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post Gothic mode.” ~ Brian Aldiss
- “Science fiction and comedy are generally a pretty bumpy mix.” ~ Matt Groening
- “Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.” ~ Timothy Leary , Science fiction quotes about freedom
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“Fantasy deals with the immeasurable while science-fiction deals with the measurable.” ~ Walter Wangerin
- “Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.” ~ Ray Bradbury
- “Science fiction, because it ventures into no man’s lands, tends to meet some of the requirements posed by Jung in his explorations of archetypes, myth structures and self-understanding. It may be that the primary attraction of science fiction is that it helps us understand what it means to be human.” ~ Frank Herbert
- “Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger.” ~ James Gunn
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“I’ve called science fiction ‘reality ahead of schedule'” ~ Syd Mead
- “Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.” ~ Tom Shippey
- “Physics has entered a remarkable era. Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction are now entering our theoretical and maybe even experimental grasp. Brand-new theoretical discoveries about extra dimensions have irreversibly changed how particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists now think about the world. The sheer number and pace of discoveries tells us that we’ve most likely only scratched the surface of the wondrous possibilities that lie in store. Ideas have taken on a life of their own.” ~ Lisa Randall
- “The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.” ~ Theodore Sturgeon
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“What’s great about science fiction is that it allows for surreal scenarios even if they pertain to the real world.” ~ Larissa Sansour
- “We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That’s the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don’t talk about football or anything like that.” ~ Kevin J. Anderson
- “I love the science-fiction genre because there’s always so many endless possibilities! It’s a limitless genre and can be fun playing around with otherworldly ideas.” ~ Laura Mennell , Science fiction quotes love
- “Sci-fi is often a metaphor. I think it’s more the themes and questions that science fiction raises rather than the exact predictions that should guide us.” ~ Peter Singer
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“I feel like science fiction is so much more mainstream now than it has been. And I feel like thats because technology has caught up with us.” ~ Alaina Huffman
- “The beauty of science fiction is its open canvas. You can hypothesize about any element of the world. It doesn’t have to be laser battles and things exploding, you can be JG Ballad and maybe just change one little thing about the real world and that becomes science fiction.” ~ Duncan Jones
- “By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.” ~ Alvin Toffler
- “My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.” ~ Alan Moore
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“Here’s a quick rule of thumb: Don’t annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they’ll do to you.” ~ John Scalzi
- “I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.” ~ China Mieville
- “We need more science, but what we especially need is science fiction.” ~ Dale Jamieson
- “I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn’t about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.” ~ Robin Wasserman
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“So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That’s why I don’t mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.” ~ Michio Kaku
- “Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.” ~ Freeman Dyson
- “Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.” ~ Paul Di Filippo
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“Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.” ~ Margaret Atwood
- “Science fiction is the very literature of change.” ~ Frederik Pohl
- “Science fiction is fantasy with bolts painted on outside.” ~ Terry Pratchett
