Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

502 Sourced Quotes

Never trust machinery more complicated than a knife and fork.

Robert A. Heinlein
The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.

Robert A. Heinlein
I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be - instead of the tawdry, lousy fouled-up mess it is.

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

Robert A. Heinlein
Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.

Robert A. Heinlein
A girl's name ending in 'a' - that always suggests a 'C' cup.

Robert A. Heinlein
Each man is his own prisoner, in solitary confinement for life.

Robert A. Heinlein
It is said that God notes each sparrow that falls. And so He does. But the proper closest statement of it that can be made in English is that God cannot avoid noting the sparrow because the Sparrow is God. And when a cat stalks a sparrow both of them are God, carrying out God's thoughts.

Robert A. Heinlein
Most people who sneer at technology would starve to death if the engineering infrastructure were removed.

Robert A. Heinlein
No man owns his genes; he's merely their custodian. They are passed to him willy-nilly in the meiotic dance; he passes them along to others through the same blind chances.

Robert A. Heinlein
"Mutation" is never an explanation; it is simply a name for an observed fact.

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

Robert A. Heinlein
I shot an error into the air. It's still going... everywhere.

Robert A. Heinlein
Around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned.

Robert A. Heinlein
The brown monkey's instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.

Robert A. Heinlein
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.

Robert A. Heinlein
Formal courtesy between husband and wife is even more important than it is between strangers.

Robert A. Heinlein
Peace is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties which do not achieve a page one lead story unless that civilian is a close relative of one of the casualties. But, if there ever was a time in history when peace meant that there was no fighting going on, I have been unable to find out about it.

Robert A. Heinlein
Once there was a race, quite unlike the human race - quite. I have no way of describing to you what they looked like or how they lived, but they had one characteristic you can understand: they were creative. The creating and enjoying of works of art was their occupation and their reason for being.

Robert A. Heinlein
If a man pushes a rock, can he ignore an avalanche that follows?

Robert A. Heinlein
Sex is a learned art, as much so as ice skating or tight wire walking or fancy diving; it is not instinct. Oh, two animals couple by instinct, but it takes intelligence and patient willingness to turn copulation into a high and lively art.

Robert A. Heinlein
You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets fretful. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.

Robert A. Heinlein
Oh, the hell with! — it did not change the statistical outcome.

Robert A. Heinlein
In the eighty or ninety years I have given to this subject, trying to trace out the meanderings of their twisty little minds, the only thing that I have learned for certain about women is that when a gal is gonna, she's gonna. All a man can do is cooperate with the inevitable.

Robert A. Heinlein
Why do some people act as if making money offended their delicate minds? I am out for a legitimate profit, and not ashamed of it; the fact that people will pay money for my goods and services shows that my work is useful.

Robert A. Heinlein
No storyteller has ever been able to dream up anything as fantastically unlikely as what really does happen in this mad universe.

Robert A. Heinlein
It was better to live with disappointment and frustration than to live without hope.

Robert A. Heinlein
Anyone can see a forest fire. Skill lies in sniffing the first smoke.

Robert A. Heinlein
It is impossible for a man to love his wife whole heartedly without loving all women somewhat. I suppose that the converse must be true of women.

Robert A. Heinlein
On two subjects the overwhelming majority of people regarded their own opinions as Absolute Truth, and sincerely believed that anyone who disagreed with them was immoral, outrageous, sinful, sacrilegious, offensive, intolerable, stupid, illogical, treasonable, actionable, against the public interest, ridiculous, and obscene. The two subjects were (of course) sex and religion.

Robert A. Heinlein