Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

I always get the shakes before a drop.

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. [He is also a fool.]

Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards.

Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category with the classic example 'a little bit pregnant.

Strictly speaking, the Patrol is not a military organization at all." "Sir?" "I know, I know - you are trained to use weapons, you are under orders, you wear a uniform. But your purpose is not to fight, but to prevent fighting, by every possible means. The Patrol is not a fighting organization; it is the repository of weapons too dangerous to entrust to military men.

I have never been impressed by the formal schools of ethics.

When one teaches, two learn.

A managed democracy is a wonderful thing ... for the managers ... and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers define what is 'irresponsible'.

Patriotism is not 'my country right or wrong'; patriotism means loving the ideals for which America stands and having the courage to speak up when these ideals are distorted for personal or political gain. The American government was instituted to be the servant of the people, not our master.

Two bodies attract each other directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of their distance.' It sounds like a rule for simple physical facts, does it not? Yet it is nothing of the sort; it was the poetical way the old ones had of expressing the rule of propinquity which governs the emotion of love. The bodies referred to are human bodies, mass is their capacity for love. Young people have a greater capacity for love than the elderly; when thy are thrown together they fall in love, yet when they are separated they soon get over it. 'Out of sight, out of mind.' It's as simple as that. But you were seeking some deep meaning for it.

That we were slaves I had known all my life
and nothing could be done about it. True, we weren't bought and sold
but as long as Authority held monopoly over what we had to have and what we could sell to buy it, we were slaves.

The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it continues until it destroys.

I needed a space suit the way a pig needs a pipe organ.

Just a man, with a face-shaped face,

It takes two to create a heaven, but hell can be accomplished by one.

When he 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 ... it's overwhelming.

People who are busy and happy don't write diaries; they are too busy living.

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had ... I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

His lights blinked in binary read-out as he answered by voder, Eleven thousand two hundred thirty-eight with uncertainty plus-minus eighty-one representing possible identities and nulls. Shall I start program?

I don't trust a man who talks about ethics when he is picking my pocket. But if he is acting in his own self-interest and says so, I have usually been able to work out some way to do business with him.

I was not in bad health (aside from a cumulative hangover), I was still on the right side of thirty by a few days, and I was far from being broke. No police were looking for me, nor any husbands, nor any process servers; there was nothing wrong that a slight case of amnesia would not have cured.
But there was winter in my heart and I was looking for the door to summer. If I sound like a man with an acute case of self-pity, you are correct. There must have been well over two billion people on this planet in worse shape than I was. Nevertheless, I was looking for the Door into Summer.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny

Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.

Most 'scientists' are bottle washers and button sorters.

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?

Daddy says that, in a dilemma, it is helpful to change any variable, then reexamine the problem.

Horace was a nice little guy who looked like one of his own baboons; he turned me over to a Doctor Vargas who was a specialist in exotic biologies
the same Vargas who was on the Second Venus Expedition. He told me what had happened and I looked at the gibbons, meantime rearranging my prejudices.

Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.

Jill: 'I don't pay attention to politics.'
Ben: 'You should. It's barely less important than your own heart beat.'
Jill: 'I don't pay attention to that, either.

Was no such thing as a "dangerous weapon," there were only dangerous men.

I believe that almost all politicians are honest. For every bribed alderman there are hundreds of politicians, low paid or not paid at all, doing their level best without thanks or glory to make our system work. If this were not true, we would never have gotten past the thirteen colonies.

I see the beauty of Mike's attempt to devise an ideal ethic and applaud his recognition that such must start by junking the present sexual code and starting fresh. Most philosophers haven't the courage for this; they swallow the basics of the present code
monogamy, family pattern, continence, body taboos, conventional restrictions on intercourse, and so forth
then fiddle with details ... even such piffle as discussing whether the female breast is an obscene sight! (p.365)

It was equally imperative that this chain of reactions should always tend to dampen, to die out. It must not build up, or the uranium mass would explode within a time interval too short to be measured by any means whatsoever. Nor would there be anyone left to measure it.

One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.

Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect.

Thy will be done –' No Muslim claiming to be a 'slave of God' ever gave a more sweeping consent than that. In that prayer you invite Him to do His worst. The perfect masochist.

Sometimes there just isn't any cure for a situation.

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.

They flew her," Matt pointed out. "Sure they did - and my hat's off to them. But it takes heroes to fly a box as primitive as this and I'm not the hero type.

Politics is not evil; politics is the human race's most magnificent achievement.

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

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.

Ninety percent of all human wisdom is the ability to mind your own business.

Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me.

the government' - that's too sweeping a term. 'The government' is several million people, nearly a million in Washington alone. We have to ask ourselves: Whose toes were being stepped on? What person or persons? Not 'the government' - but what individuals?

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.

Let's skip [Mobile Infantry] tradition for a moment. Can you think of anything sillier than being fired out of a spaceship with nothing but mayhem and sudden death at the other end? However, if someone must do this idiotic stunt, do you know a surer way to keep a man keyed up to the point where he is willing than by keeping him constantly reminded that the only good reason why men fight is a living, breathing reality?
"In a mixed ship [men and women] the last thing a trooper hears before a drop (maybe the last word he ever hears) is a woman's voice, wishing him luck. If you don't think this is important you've probably resigned from the human race.

A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.

Ability is a wonderful thing, but its value is greatly enhanced by dependability. Ability implies repeatability and accountability.

If it has to be done, a man - a real man - shoots his own dog himself; he doesn't hire a proxy who may bungle it.

More people worry themselves to death than bleed to death.

A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate.

All revelations are personal, that's why all revelations are suspect.

Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?

The word 'love' designates a subjective condition in which the welfare and happiness of another person are essential to one's own happiness.

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've never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will.

Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily.

I hate to tell you this, but you are just stupid and eager and sincere enough to make the kind of officer that men love to follow into some silly predicament.

Cast me into a dungeon;, burn me at the state, crown me king of kings, I can 'pursue happiness' as long as my brain lives
but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.

The drive for power is even less logical than the sex urge ... and stronger.

Have time to take out your soul and look at it.

I don't gamble, if you will concede that poker is a game of skill.

The moral difference between a soldier and a civilian is that the soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member. The civilian does not.

The greatest productive force is human selfishness.

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.

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Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your effective lifetime - and thereby gives time to enjoy butterflies and kittens and rainbows.

Support for the arts
merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" - find out how he feels about astrology.

The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of 'rights' . . . and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.

To enjoy the flavor of life,
take big bites!

Between being 'right' and being kind, I know which way I vote.

Good!" the creature echoed. "Doctor Nelson will be along in a minute. Feel like some breakfast?" All four symbols in the query were in Smith's vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard them rightly. He knew that he was food, but he did not "feel like" food. Nor had he had any warning that he might be selected for such an honor. He had not known that the food supply was such that it was necessary to reduce the corporate group. He was filled with mild regret, since there was still so much to grok of these new events, but no reluctance.

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.

There ought not to be anything in the whole universe that man can't poke his nose into-that's the way we're built and I assume that there's some reason for that.

You don't own a cat, he is a free citizen. Take

That's a subject as safe as being in favor of Christmas.

Always cut the cards ... and smile when you lose.

Another ingredient in a happy marriage: Budget the luxuries first!

Getting a problem analyzed is two-thirds of solving it.

You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated. After he pees in it himself, he likes the flavor much better, so he buys it.

Winslow says I don't understand plotting and probably I don't - I have been congratulated many times on the skill shown in my plotting when I knew damn well that the story in question had not been plotted in advance at all. My notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changes his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How h copes with it I can't plot because that depends on his character, and I don't know his what his character is until i get acquainted with him. When I can "hear the character talk" then I'm all right - he works out his own salvation.

The best things in history are accomplished by people who get tired of being shoved around.

Jubal longed for the days when a lawyer could cite the Bill of Rights and not have some over-riding Federation trickery defeat him.

If the universe has any purpose more important than topping a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help, I've never heard of it.

Marrying Gretchen is a good idea, darling; I would enjoy bringing her up. Teaching her to shoot, helping her with her first baby, coaching her in how to handle a knife, working out with her in martial arts, all the homey domestic skills a girl needs in this modern world.

Age does not bring wisdom, Ben, but it does give perspective ... and the saddest sight of all is to see, far behind you, temptations you've resisted.

I'm not feisty. But when you're as small as I am and female if you don't stand up for your rights, you're sure to be pushed around by big, hairy, smelly men with delusions about male superiority.

The mind's ability to rationalize it's own shortcomings is unlimited; I am no exception.

When I don't understand, I have an unbearable itch to know why.

A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it - it keeps him upright.

Library Science is the key to all science, just as mathematics is its language - and civilization will rise or fall, depending on how well librarians do their jobs.

Once in a great while lips meet and two spirits merge for a time and the universe is right and complete and the planets wheel in their proper places. Once in a while the lonely, broken spirit of man is healed and made whole. For a while his quest is over and his questions are answered.

Spacemen die if they stay in one place.

I had never been much interested in Pluto, too many facts and too much isolation.

I told you when you hired him that - " "When I hired him?" "Don't interrupt. - that any man who would take money two ways would take it three ways just as quickly.

My dear, religion is a null area in the law. A church can do anything any organization can do - and has no restrictions. It pays no taxes, need not publish records, is effectively immune to search, inspection, or control - and a church is anything that calls itself a church. Attempts have been made to distinguish between 'real' religions entitled to immunities, and 'cults.' It can't be done, short of establishing a state religion . . . a cure worse than the disease.

Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.

Learn to say No - and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you.

What was "grokking"? He had been using the word for a week - and he didn't grok it.