Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

502 Sourced Quotes

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
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
If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off?

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

Robert A. Heinlein
Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure good government, it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things, but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the backseat driver syndrome.

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

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

Robert A. Heinlein
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
Mike is our Prometheus — but that's all. Mike keeps emphazing this. Thou art God, I am God, he is God — all that groks. Mike is a man like the rest of us. A superior man admittedly — a lesser man taught the things the Martians know, might have set himself up as a pipsqueak god. Mike is above that temptation. Prometheus… but that is all.

Robert A. Heinlein
By the data to date, there is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man — man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no enemy to help him.

Robert A. Heinlein
A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.

Robert A. Heinlein
I expect this to be my last venture in this field; 'tain't worth the grief

Robert A. Heinlein
A little more money won't do you any good - because daughters can use up ten percent more than a man can make in any normal occupation, regardless of the amount.

Robert A. Heinlein
Dad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just as math is the key — and we will survive or founder, depending on how well the librarians do their jobs. Librarians didn't look glamorous to me but maybe Dad had hit on a not very obvious truth.

Robert A. Heinlein
How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven.

Robert A. Heinlein
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.

Robert A. Heinlein
I was no fool; I was aware that when another man is too anxious to force money on one, it is time to examine the cards, for there is almost certainly something illegal, or dangerous, or both, involved in the matter.

Robert A. Heinlein
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Robert A. Heinlein
I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in. I noted the time — 10: 17 P. M. zone five, or eastern time, November 7th, 1970. Temporal agents always notice time and date; we must.
The Unmarried Mother was a man twenty-five years old, no taller than I am, childish features and a touchy temper. I didn't like his looks — I never had — but he was a lad I was here to recruit, he was my boy. I gave him my best barkeep's smile.

Robert A. Heinlein
At the time I wrote Methuselah's Children I was still politically quite naive and still had hopes that various libertarian notions could be put over by political processes… It [now] seems to me that every time we manage to establish one freedom, they take another one away. Maybe two. And that seems to me characteristic of a society as it gets older, and more crowded, and higher taxes, and more laws.

Robert A. Heinlein
If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against.

Robert A. Heinlein