60 Most Thought Provoking Sci-Fi Quotes

In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.

― Ray Bradbury

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, Fictions of every kind

Erase myself from the human race
all aboard this rocket into space
I'll die sci-fi
and kiss the Earth goodbye

― Wednesday 13, Die Sci Fi

I miss the hopeful side of science fiction, which really goes back to the roots of the genre, and that is: what can we achieve if we put our minds to it?

― Seth Macfarlane, Star Trek: Discovery

Some writers are still blindly enamored with science and gadgetry, but i don't think it's as prevalent as it once was. Almost everybody these days pays lip service to literary value; some people talk the talk without walking the walk, but i do believe that most sf/fantasy writers are aiming above the least common denominator.

― James Alan Gardner

The power of science fiction, and what's positive about it, is that you're able to experience the worst-case scenario without actually having to live it.

― Ryan Gosling

When i was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you flash gordon all evening, or buck rogers.

― Ray Bradbury

Most of what i do is science fiction. Some of the things i do are fantasy. I don't like the labels, they're marketing tools, and i certainly don't worry about them when i'm writing. They are also inhibiting factors; you wind up not getting read by certain people, or not getting sold to certain people because they think they know what you write. You say science fiction and everybody thinks star wars or star trek.

― Octavia E. Butler

I Do a lot of work on prison abolition. What can justice look like outside the context of prisons and police, and really rooted in community accountability, healing, and restorative ideas of justice? Science fiction is a perfect testing ground for these issues, because the vast majority of people can't imagine a world without prisons.

― Walidah Imarisha

Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation. Our children should be studying arthur c. Clarke, william tenn, robert heinlein, ray bradbury and robert sheckley, not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults.

― Alvin Toffler, Future shock

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

Climate-themed fiction, like most science fiction, is extension, not invention. But as scientists' projections about the effects of climate change have increasingly become reality, some works of apocalyptic fiction have begun to seem all too plausible.

― Livia Albeck-Ripka

One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. Two-thirds of 2001 is realistic -- hardware and technology -- to establish background for the metaphysical, philosophical, and religious meanings later.

― Arthur C. Clarke

Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.

― Timothy Leary

I mean, to me, the best science fiction is obviously not about explosions and action. It's about people and it's about finding clever ways to write allegorically about what's going on in the world.

― Seth Macfarlane

Any time we try to envision a different world--without poverty, prisons, capitalism, war--we are engaging in science fiction. When we can dream those realities together, that's when we can begin to build them right here and now.

― Walidah Imarisha

Science fiction is a way to tell stories that seem too harsh or real if they happen in our own time.

― Dana Price

Science fiction is the only genre that really allows you to explore issues with a point of view without seeming preachy.

― Seth Macfarlane

Science fiction is at its best when it takes a crazy concept and applies it to real world issues.

― Germain Lussier

One of the purposes of literature is to transport the reader. Science fiction does that. Let more ponderous branches of the art also edify, inform, and elevate. They, too, transport the reader, but rarely as far up as sirius or as far down as the hydrogen atom.

― Groff Conklin

Imagination and ideas. You cannot find a solution to a problem until you imagine that solution first. If you are incapable of imagining that which is not there or has never been, you are already at a huge disadvantage. Science fiction does all this.

― Nnedi Okoroafor

Joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.

― Philip K. Dick

Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.

― Octavia E. Butler

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.” 

― Octavia E. Butler

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” 
― Frederik Pohl

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.” 
― Susan Sontag

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.” 

― Marvin Minsky

One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before.” 

― Jo Walton, Among Others

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.” 

― Ted Chiang

It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.” 

― Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge

Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology.” 

― Michael Shermer

Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction.”

― Gene Wolfe

Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.”

― Brian W. Aldiss

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.” 

― Samuel R. Delany

Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.”

― Freeman John Dyson, Imagined Worlds

Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

― Brian Aldiss

We're living in science fiction, but we don't realize it.

― Terry Pratchett