Humor and Laughter - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Laughter can be of different colors. It is only an echo of a distant explosion within you. It may be festive - red, blue, and golden fireworks; or - torn fragments of a human body flying up . . .

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

Humor is a developed sense, stemming basically from cruelty.

- Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, ''When the Bough Breaks'' (1944)

Laff-ing spreads from mind to mind like fire in a pile of sticks. [. . .] There is a contagious sort of charm in this laff-ing of theirs. Oh, not the sound - that is mere cacophony - but the soft dissolving of all serious thought that goes with it.

- Laurence Manning, ''Good-Bye, Ilha!'' (1952)

The basic trouble with outer space, thought Van, was that a man lost his sense of humor.

- Doris Pitkin Buck, ''Spanish Spoken'' (1957)

Apparently the expectation of humor was enough to produce the illusion of humor, and the comedian could elicit laughter with gesture and expression, regardless of what he said.

- Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

''Did they remember to program a sense of humor, as well, young lady?'' ''We are directed to develop a sense of proportion, sir, which contributes the same effect.''

- Anne McCaffrey, ''The ShipWho Sang'' (1961)

He was made, put on this planet, to suffer; no wonder he's a great comic. For Bunny comedy was a struggle, a fighting back against the reality of literal physical pain.

- Philip K. Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

I have wondered whether the art of being amusing, with its implied detachment from self, is not one of the most undervalued requisites of human civilization.

- BrianW. Aldiss, ''The Small Stones of Tu Fu'' (1978)

''You seem to have a sense of humor that most Security people lack.'' ''It's not a sense of humor,'' Afriel said sadly. ''It's a sense of irony disguised as one.''

- Bruce Sterling, ''Swarm'' (1982)

The gods gave people a sense of humour to make up for giving them sex.

- Terry Pratchett, Pyramids (1989)

Sometimes, Number One, you just have to bow to the absurd.

- Melinda Snodgrass, ''Up the Long Ladder,'' episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1989)

She laugh like a dolphin leaping.

- Nalo Hopkinson, ''Fisherman'' (2001)