Robert A. Heinlein Quotes - Page 3

A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.
Robert A. Heinlein
The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
Robert A. Heinlein
If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.
Robert A. Heinlein
One might almost define intelligence as the level at which an aware organism demands, 'What's in it for me?
Robert A. Heinlein
Library science was the foundation of all sciences.
Robert A. Heinlein
Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times
Robert A. Heinlein
Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.
Robert A. Heinlein
Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.
Robert A. Heinlein
A thing can be fine on paper but utterly crummy in the field.
Robert A. Heinlein
Butterflies are self propelled flowers.
Robert A. Heinlein
I was there to see beautiful naked women. So was everybody else. It's a common failing.
Robert A. Heinlein
Every citizen is free to perform any act which does not hamper the equal freedom of another. No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of any other person.
Robert A. Heinlein
Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.
Robert A. Heinlein
He had learned that close-held secrets could often be cracked by going all the way to the top and there making himself unbearably unpleasant. He knew that such twisting of the tiger's tail was dangerous, for he understood the psychopathology of great power.
Robert A. Heinlein
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.
Robert A. Heinlein
To permit irresponsible authority is to sell disaster.
Robert A. Heinlein
I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth--then shut up.
Robert A. Heinlein
You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.
Robert A. Heinlein
It's a long story. Want a refill?""No, let's start the steak. Where's the button?""Right here.""Well, push it.""Me? You offered to cook.""Ben Caxton, I will lie here and starve before I will get up to push a button six inches from your finger""As you wish." He pressed the button. "But don't forget who cooked dinner.
Robert A. Heinlein
Yes, sir, there are things to see and do on the French Riviera without spending money.
Robert A. Heinlein
The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.
Robert A. Heinlein
Sex, whatever else it is, is an athletic skill. The more you practice, the more you can, the more you want to, the more you enjoy it, the less it tires you.
Robert A. Heinlein
Freedom is a hard habit to break.
Robert A. Heinlein
For the first time in my life, I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet's censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy...censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked, contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything---you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
Robert A. Heinlein
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms
Robert A. Heinlein
Secrecy begets tyranny.
Robert A. Heinlein
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Robert A. Heinlein
There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective, that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time . . . .We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. We're the bloody infantry, the doughboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person. We've been doing it, with changes in weapons but very little change in our trade, at least since the time five thousand years ago when the foot sloggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry "Uncle!"Maybe they'll be able to do without us someday. Maybe some mad enius with myopia, a bulging forehead, and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition, adn force it to surrender or die--without killing that gang of your own people they've got imprisoned down there. I wouldn't know; I'm not a genius, I'm an M.I. In the meantime, until they build a machine to replace us, my mates can handle that job--and I might be some help on it, too.
Robert A. Heinlein
Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.
Robert A. Heinlein
If we can use an H-bomb--and as you said it's no checker game; it's real, it's war and nobody is fooling around--isn't it sort of ridiculous to go crawling around in the weeds, throwing knives and maybe getting yourself killed . . . and even losing the war . . . when you've got a real weapon you can use to win? What's the point in a whole lot of men risking their lives with obsolete weapons when one professor type can do so much more just by pushing a button?'Zim didn't answer at once, which wasn't like him at all. Then he said softly, 'Are you happy in the Infantry, Hendrick? You can resign, you know.'Hendrick muttered something; Zim said, 'Speak up!'I'm not itching to resign, sir. I'm going to sweat out my term.'I see. Well, the question you asked is one that a sergeant isn't really qualified to answer . . . and one that you shouldn't ask me. You're supposed to know the answer before you join up. Or you should. Did your school have a course in History and Moral Philosophy?'What? Sure--yes, sir.'Then you've heard the answer. But I'll give you my own--unofficial--views on it. If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cuts its head off?'Why . . . no, sir!'Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy with an H-Bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an ax. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how--or why--he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people--"older and wiser heads," as they say--supply the control. Which is as it should be. That's the best answer I can give you. If it doesn't satisfy you, I'll get you a chit to go talk to the regimental commander. If he can't convince you--then go home and be a civilian! Because in that case you will certainly never make a soldier.
Robert A. Heinlein
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.
Robert A. Heinlein
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.
Robert A. Heinlein
Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.
Robert A. Heinlein
I had never been much interested in Pluto, too many facts and too much isolation.
Robert A. Heinlein
Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. [He is also a fool.]
Robert A. Heinlein
More depended on the student than on the school.
Robert A. Heinlein
When you read about chemistry and physics, you want to do them too.
Robert A. Heinlein
The Mother Thing makes our world.
Robert A. Heinlein
But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing, I became too stink in’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees.
Robert A. Heinlein
The country and culture commonly known as "America" had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees---its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.
Robert A. Heinlein
The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.
Robert A. Heinlein
People simplify 'Apollonian' into 'mild', and 'calm', and 'cool'. But 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin--a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox.
Robert A. Heinlein
No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain.
Robert A. Heinlein
Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.
Robert A. Heinlein
One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
Robert A. Heinlein
Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Robert A. Heinlein
It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . 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
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Robert A. Heinlein
Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.
Robert A. Heinlein
There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?
Robert A. Heinlein
Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness.
Robert A. Heinlein
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
Robert A. Heinlein
Death isn't funny." "Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.
Robert A. Heinlein
The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for---if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.
Robert A. Heinlein
Başkalarının işine burnunu sokmamak insanın sahip olabileceği bilgeliğin yüzde seksenidir... kalan yüzde yirmi de pek önemli değildir zaten.
Robert A. Heinlein
Bir kaplanın sırtında yolculuk etmenin en önemli kuralı, kulaklarını asla bırakmamaktır.
Robert A. Heinlein
But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.
Robert A. Heinlein
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
Robert A. Heinlein
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Robert A. Heinlein
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 - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.
Robert A. Heinlein