Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

502 Sourced Quotes

Well, in the first place an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization. That's a personal evaluation only. But gunfighting has a strong biological use. We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days. But to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both. It's a good thing.

Robert A. Heinlein
I was just trying to show you, he went on, just how insubstantial a 'common sense' idea can be when you pin it down. Neither 'common sense' nor 'logic' can prove anything. Proof comes from experiment, or to put it another way, from experience, and from nothing else.

Robert A. Heinlein
When you're rich, you don't have friends; you just have endless acquaintances.

Robert A. Heinlein
It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.

Robert A. Heinlein
Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay - and claims a halo for his dishonesty

Robert A. Heinlein
If tempted by something that feels 'altruistic,' examine your motives and root out that self-deception. Then, if you still want to do it, wallow in it!

Robert A. Heinlein
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 bit right to the bone…and not even know that he's doing it. As writers' wives and husbands often learn to their horror.

Robert A. Heinlein
In Wilson's scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality.

Robert A. Heinlein
How can I possibly put a new idea into your heads, if I do not first remove your delusions?

Robert A. Heinlein
If there was anything, anything more at all, after this crazy mix-up we call living, I could feel that there might be some point to the whole frantic business, even if I did not know and could not know the full answer while I was alive.
And suppose there was not? Suppose that when a man's body disintegrates, he himself disappears absolutely. I'm bound to say I find it a probable hypothesis.
Well— It wouldn't be cheerful knowledge, but it would be better than not knowing. You could plan your life rationally, at least. A man might even be able to get a certain amount of satisfaction in planning things better for the future, after he's gone. A vicarious pleasure in the anticipation.

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
Oh, we get along. She lets me have my own way, and later I find out I've done just what she wanted me to do.

Robert A. Heinlein
A woman is not property, and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dreamworld.

Robert A. Heinlein
Wong shook his head sadly. I sometimes think that modern education is deliberately designed to handicap a boy.

Robert A. Heinlein
They made the predictable fuss about taking a cat into a room and an autobellhop is not responsive to bribes—hardly an improvement. But the assistant manager had more flexibility in his synapses; He listened to reason as long as it was crisp and rustled.

Robert A. Heinlein
Money problems can always be solved by a man not frightened by them.

Robert A. Heinlein
High I. Q., good compatibility index, superior education—everything that makes a person pleasant and easy and interesting to have around.

Robert A. Heinlein
One man's "magic" is another man's engineering. "Supernatural" is a null word.

Robert A. Heinlein
Heroism' often consists in keeping your head in an emergency and doing the best you can with what you have instead of panicking and being shot in the tail. People who fight this way win more battles than do intentional heroes; a glory hound often throws away the lives of his mates as well as his own.

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
Anything free costs twice as much in the long run or turns out worthless.

Robert A. Heinlein
We came here for a small, informal meeting. We find you've turned it into a circus. Well, if you're going to have a circus, you've got to have elephants.

Robert A. Heinlein
A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking.

Robert A. Heinlein
It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired.

Robert A. Heinlein
Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person.

Robert A. Heinlein
Gratitude: An imaginary emotion that rewards an imaginary behavior, altruism. Both imaginaries are false faces for selfishness, which is a real and honest emotion.

Robert A. Heinlein
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.

Robert A. Heinlein
Only a sadistic scoundrel-or a fool-tells the bald truth on social occasions.

Robert A. Heinlein
Modern theory did not arise from revolutionary ideas which have been, so to speak, introduced into the exact sciences from without. On the contrary, they have forced their way into research which was attempting consistently to carry out the program of classical physics — they arise out of its very nature.

Robert A. Heinlein
Democracy's worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents.

Robert A. Heinlein