Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

502 Sourced Quotes

One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die...and accepts his sentence undismayed.

Robert A. Heinlein
Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative. An animal so poor in spirit that he won't even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.

Robert A. Heinlein
All normal human beings have soi-disant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts: those who know this and those who do not.

Robert A. Heinlein
How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show — it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

Robert A. Heinlein
Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good.

Robert A. Heinlein
Mass psychology is not simply a summation of individual psychologies; that is a prime theorem of social psychodynamics—not just my opinion; no exception has ever been found to this theorem. It is the social mass-action rule, the mob-hysteria law, known and used by military, political, and religious leaders, by advertising men and prophets and propagandists, by rabble rousers and actors and gang leaders, for generations before it was formulated in mathematical symbols. It works.

Robert A. Heinlein
At that point I realized that I had been thinking in Russian. It's a wonderful language for paranoid thoughts.

Robert A. Heinlein
Whenever women have insisted on absolute equality with men, they have invariably wound up with the dirty end of the stick. What they are and what they can do makes them superior to men, and their proper tactic is to demand special privileges, all the traffic will bear. They should never settle merely for equality. For women, "equality" is a disaster.

Robert A. Heinlein
Once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind.

Robert A. Heinlein
There is nothing in this world so permanent as a temporary emergency.

Robert A. Heinlein
Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled.

Robert A. Heinlein
Criminals are never materially handicapped by such rules; the only effect is to disarm the peaceful citizen and put him fully at the mercy of the lawless. Such rules look very pretty on paper; in practice they are as foolish and footless as the attempt of the mice to bell the cat.

Robert A. Heinlein
I think the major problem in growing up is to become sophisticated without becoming cynical.

Robert A. Heinlein
You're in bad shape when your emotions force you into acts which you know are foolish.

Robert A. Heinlein
Son, suppose you tend to your knitting and I tend to mine.

Robert A. Heinlein
If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off?

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
Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.

Robert A. Heinlein
Wisdom includes not getting angry unnecessarily. The Law ignores trifles and the wise man does, too.

Robert A. Heinlein
I came, I saw, she conquered." The original Latin seems to have been garbled.

Robert A. Heinlein
Behaving on a still higher moral level were the astronauts who went to the Moon, for their actions tend toward the survival of the entire race of mankind.

Robert A. Heinlein
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to virgins.

Robert A. Heinlein
You can go wrong by being skeptical as readily as by being too trusting.

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

Robert A. Heinlein
Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't bet you can't win.

Robert A. Heinlein
Revolution is an art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve. Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying as a victory.

Robert A. Heinlein
Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good." He wished that government would wander off and get lost!

Robert A. Heinlein
The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Robert A. Heinlein
A rational anarchist believes that concepts, such as "state" and "society" and "government" have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame... as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world... aware that his efforts will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.

Robert A. Heinlein
A religion is sometime a source of happiness, and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong. 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