Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

502 Sourced Quotes

He posed me a question which I must answer correctly—else he will not co-operate.
Huh? What was the question?
I'll ask you. Martha, what is the meaning of life?
What! Why, what a stupid question!
He did not ask it stupidly.
It's a psychopathic question, unlimited, unanswerable, and, in all probability, sense free.

Robert A. Heinlein
Self awareness is NOT just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

Robert A. Heinlein
His bow to me must have been calculated on a slide rule; it suggested that I was about to be Supreme Minister but was not quite there yet, that I was his senior but nevertheless a civilian — then subtract five degrees for the fact that he wore the Emperor's aiguillette on his right shoulder.

Robert A. Heinlein
It's impossible for a woman to lay it on too thick with a man. If you tell a man he's eight feet tall and say it often enough, with your eyes wide and a throb in your voice, he'll start stooping to go through seven-foot doors.

Robert A. Heinlein
The more you love, the more you can love—and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just.

Robert A. Heinlein
First they junked the concept of justice. Examined semantically justice has no referent—there is no observable phenomenon in the space-time-matter continuum to which one can point, and say, This is justice. Science can deal only with that which can be observed and measured. Justice is not such a matter; therefore it can never have the same meaning to one as to another; any noises said about it will only add to confusion.
But damage, physical or economic, can be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic, to some particular person, they declared to be lawful.

Robert A. Heinlein
The future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands... with tools... with horse sense and science and engineering.

Robert A. Heinlein
Sometimes I think, he told Tex, that Th'Wing thinks that I am an idiot studying hard to become a moron—but flunking the course.

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
Pessimist by policy, optimist by temperament- it is possible to be both. How? By never taking an unnecessary chance and by minimizing the risks you can't avoid. This permits you to play out the game untroubled by the certainty of the outcome.

Robert A. Heinlein
You got the impression that he never needed to sleep - just ten-thousand-mile checkups and dust him off occasionally.

Robert A. Heinlein
Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.

Robert A. Heinlein
The sort of guardian you can hire is worth about as much as the sort of wife you can buy.

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
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

Robert A. Heinlein
Hans had courage to burn. If he had been willing to knuckle under to the Nazis he would have stayed at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. But Hans was a scientist. He wouldn't trim his notion of truth to fit political gangsters.

Robert A. Heinlein
I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes, will endure —will endure longer than his home planet, will spread out to the other planets, to the stars, and beyond, carrying with him his honesty, his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage —and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart.

Robert A. Heinlein
I started clipping and filing by categories on trends as early as 1930 and my "youngest" file was started in 1945.
Span of time is important; the 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

Robert A. Heinlein
We may eliminate death someday but I doubt if we'll ever eliminate taxes.

Robert A. Heinlein
I am opposed to all attempts to license or restrict the arming of individuals... I consider such laws a violation of civil liberty, subversive of democratic political institutions, and self-defeating in their purpose.

Robert A. Heinlein
Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.

Robert A. Heinlein
Women are amazing creatures-sweet, soft, gentle, and far more savage than we are.

Robert A. Heinlein
Dr. Russell, I concede that Washington has an atrocious climate. But you will have air-conditioned offices.
With clocks, no doubt. And secretaries. And soundproofing.
Anything you want, doctor.
The point is, Mr. Secretary, I don't want them. This household has no clocks. Nor calendars. Once I had a large income and a larger ulcer; I now have a small income and no ulcer. I stay here.
But the job needs you.
The need is not mutual.

Robert A. Heinlein
What we think of as 'Physical beauty' is almost certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness—intelligence—among them.

Robert A. Heinlein
Don't pay any attention to what she says. Half of it's always wrong and she doesn't mean the rest.

Robert A. Heinlein
I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces — with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way the government sticks its nose into everything, now.

Robert A. Heinlein
Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don't walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don't know how to describe it, but it's much more complex and utterly delightful. They don't move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions... and all of it graceful.

Robert A. Heinlein
Er, will your grandmother tell that fib for you?
I guess so. Yes, I'm sure she will. She says people have to tell little white fibs or else people couldn't stand each other. But she says fibs were meant to be used, not abused.
She sounds like a sensible person.

Robert A. Heinlein
What course of action do you favor?
Me? Why, none. Mary, if there is any one thing I have learned in the past couple of centuries, it's this: These things pass. Wars and depressions and Prophets and Covenants—they pass. The trick is to stay alive through them.

Robert A. Heinlein
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.

Robert A. Heinlein