Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

He was finding it ruinously expensive to be rich.
Robert A. Heinlein
If you got good elective officials in your day, it was a happy accident, better than you deserved.
Robert A. Heinlein
He's an honest politician--he stays bought.
Robert A. Heinlein
My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.
Robert A. Heinlein
To die trying is the proudest humans thing.
Robert A. Heinlein
The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.
Robert A. Heinlein
As for logic and internal consistency, these mundane rules do not apply to sacred writings and never have...
Robert A. Heinlein
You are telling me that I did something because I was going to do something.”“Well, didn’t you? You were there.”“No, I didn’t—no… well, maybe I did, but it didn’t feel like it.”“Why should you expect it to? It was something totally new to your experience.”“But… but—” Wilson took a deep breath and got control of himself. Then he reached back into his academic philosophical concepts and produced the notion he had been struggling to express. “It denies all reasonable theories of causation. You would have me believe that causation can be completely circular. I went through because I came back from going through to persuade myself to go through. That’s silly.”“Well, didn’t you?
Robert A. Heinlein
. . .and he has nevergiven up his conviction that if you just try all the doors one of them is bound to be the Door intoSummer. You know, I think he is right.
Robert A. Heinlein
Take sides! Always take sides! You will sometimes be wrong - but the man who refuses to take sides must always be wrong.
Robert A. Heinlein
Butterflies are not insects,' Captain John Sterling said soberly. 'They are self-propelled flowers.
Robert A. Heinlein
Richard, Bill has the socialist disease in its worst form; he thinks the world owes him a living. He told me sincerely - smugly! - that of course everyone was entitled to the best possible medical and hospital service - free of course, unlimited of course, and of course the government should pay for it.
Robert A. Heinlein
My old man says when it's time to be counted, the important thing is to be man enough to stand up.
Robert A. Heinlein
There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.
Robert A. Heinlein
A hero must hero.
Robert A. Heinlein
- I'm so busy doing what I must do that I don't have time for what I ought to do... and I never get a chance to do what I want to do!- Son, that's universal. The way to keep that recipe from killing you is occasionally to do what you want to do anyhow.
Robert A. Heinlein
He was delighted to recognize his own human name on two of the papers; he always got an odd thrill out of reading it, as if he were two places at once.
Robert A. Heinlein
There were many, many times thereafter that Don regretted having enlisted - but so has every man who ever volunteered for military service.
Robert A. Heinlein
You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.
Robert A. Heinlein
Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
Robert A. Heinlein
Love" is a that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own...Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy
Robert A. Heinlein
For millennia philosophers and saints have tried to reason out a logical scheme for the universe... until Hilda came along and demonstrated that the universe is not logical but whimsical, its structure depending solely on the dreams and nightmares of non-logical dreamers.
Robert A. Heinlein
His was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.
Robert A. Heinlein
Heinlein's Rules for Writers Rule One: You Must WriteRule Two: Finish What Your StartRule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial OrderRule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the MarketRule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold
Robert A. Heinlein
But, do you know, once you get used to it's rather cute. I mean, if a girl looks alright to start with, she still looks alright with her head smooth.
Robert A. Heinlein
Anne is God. I am God. The happy grass are God, Jill groks in beauty always. Jill is God. All shaping and making and creating together.
Robert A. Heinlein
The coldest depth of Hell is reserved for people who abandon kittens.
Robert A. Heinlein
Never try to out-stubborn a cat.
Robert A. Heinlein
Never try to outstubborn a cat.
Robert A. Heinlein
The golden sunshine of Italy congealed into tears. Here's to alcoholic brotherhood ... much more suited to the frail human soul, if any, than any other sort.
Robert A. Heinlein
...I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write......writing is antisocial. It's as solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is likely to turn and bite right to the bone... and not even know that he's doing it. As writers' wives and husbands often learn to their horror......there is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured. In a household with more than one person, of which one is a writer, the only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private, and where food can be poked in to him with a stick. Because, if you disturb the patient at such times, he may break into tears or become violent. Or he may not hear you at all... and, if you shake him at this stage, he bites...
Robert A. Heinlein
Were you born stupid, Heinrich, or did you have to study?
Robert A. Heinlein
Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.
Robert A. Heinlein
Anything which is physically possible can be made financially possible, if the people of a state desire it.
Robert A. Heinlein
All those religions--they contradict each other on every point but every one of them is filled with ways to help people to be brave enough to laugh even though they know they are dying.
Robert A. Heinlein
History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion — ie., none to speak of
Robert A. Heinlein
God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends. This may not be true, but it sounds good—and is no sillier than any other theology.
Robert A. Heinlein
Could dump two Chinee down in one of our maria and they would get rich selling rocks to each other while raising twelve kids. Then a Hindu would sell retail stuff he got from them wholesale--below cost at a fat profit. We got along.
Robert A. Heinlein
Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is-- so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.
Robert A. Heinlein
…majority rule gives the ruthless strong man plenty of elbow room to oppress his fellows.
Robert A. Heinlein
Does history record any case in which the majority was right?
Robert A. Heinlein
The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.
Robert A. Heinlein
It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can't be enforced weakens all other laws.
Robert A. Heinlein
Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more. All the wealthy, unhappy people you're ever met take sleeping pills; Mobile Infantrymen don't need them. Give a cap trooper a bunk and time to sack out in it and he's as happy as a worm in an apple - asleep.
Robert A. Heinlein
His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching.
Robert A. Heinlein
I’ve been kissed by men who did a very good job. But they don’t give kissing their whole attention. They can’t. No matter how hard they try parts of their minds are on something else. Missing the last bus—or their chances of making the gal—or their own techniques in kissing—or maybe worry about jobs, or money, or will husband or papa or the neighbors catch on. Mike doesn’t have technique . . . but when Mike kisses you he isn’t doing anything else. You’re his whole universe . . . and the moment is eternal because he doesn’t have any plans and isn’t going anywhere. Just kissing you.
Robert A. Heinlein
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
Robert A. Heinlein
Many problems can be solved by a man not frightened by them.
Robert A. Heinlein
Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive.
Robert A. Heinlein
When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.
Robert A. Heinlein
How is a sincere criminal, trying hard, going to get ahead in his profession if his victim fails to cooperate?
Robert A. Heinlein
there used to be, dirtside, a legal defenses called "diminished capacity" and "not guilty by reason on insanity." These concepts would bewilder a Loonie. In Luna City a man would necessarily be of diminished mental capacity to even think about rape; to carry one out would be the strongest possible proof of insanity - but among Loonies such mental disorders would not gain a rapist any sympathy. loonies do not psychoanalyze a rapist; they kill him. Now. Fast. Brutally.
Robert A. Heinlein
In the twentieth century, nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America---and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it.
Robert A. Heinlein
Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
Robert A. Heinlein
The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason - but one cannot have both.
Robert A. Heinlein
. . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.
Robert A. Heinlein
The less respect an older person deserves the more certain he is to demand it from anyone younger.
Robert A. Heinlein
If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.
Robert A. Heinlein
You can't believe what a lovely planet we have until you see her from outside.
Robert A. Heinlein
But one way or another competing and weeding takes place . . . or a race goes downhill.
Robert A. Heinlein