Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

502 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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