Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

502 Sourced Quotes

Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something. Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?

Robert A. Heinlein
Another ingredient in a happy marriage: Budget the luxuries first!

Robert A. Heinlein
There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to see a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's science. Three: Awareness that you live in a malevolent universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset in part by Brewster's Factor: that's engineering.

Robert A. Heinlein
Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards.

Robert A. Heinlein
This is the great day. This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race, up to this time. That is — today is New Year's Day of the Year One. If we don't change the calendar, historians will do so. The human race — this is our change, our puberty rite, bar mitzvah, confirmation, from the change of our infancy into adulthood for the human race. And we're going to go on out, not only to the Moon, to the stars; we're going to spread. I don't know that the United States is going to do it; I hope so. I have — I'm an American myself; I want it to be done by us. But in any case, the human race is going to do it, it's utterly inevitable: we're going to spread through the entire universe.

Robert A. Heinlein
Money is the sincerest of all flattery. Women love to be flattered. So do men.

Robert A. Heinlein
Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For a first offense, that is.

Robert A. Heinlein
Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything.

Robert A. Heinlein
At one time kings were anointed by Deity, so the problem was to see to it that Deity chose the right candidate. In this age the myth is 'the will of the people'... but the problem changes only superficially.

Robert A. Heinlein
Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.

Robert A. Heinlein
Son, that phrase is self-contradictory; "sense" is never "common".

Robert A. Heinlein
Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of single-minded devotion to acquiring it and making it grow into more money.

Robert A. Heinlein
He shut up, realizing that grim old Mother Nature, red of tooth and claw, invariably punished damn fools who tried to ignore Her or repeal Her ordinances.

Robert A. Heinlein
Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman's breasts; it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy.

Robert A. Heinlein
There is an old, old story about a theologian who was asked to reconcile the Doctrine of Divine Mercy with the doctrine of infant damnation. 'The Almighty,' he explained, 'finds it necessary to do things in His official and public capacity which in His private and personal capacity He deplores.

Robert A. Heinlein
When an apparent fact runs contrary to logic and common sense, it's obvious that you have failed to interpret the fact correctly.

Robert A. Heinlein
Pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival.

Robert A. Heinlein
The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate.

Robert A. Heinlein
I don't "believe" in anything. I know certain things — little things, not the Nine Billion Names of God — from experience. But I have no beliefs. Belief gets in the way of learning.

Robert A. Heinlein
Most "scientists" are bottle washers and button sorters.

Robert A. Heinlein
Contemplation must bring forth right action in order to permit further growth.

Robert A. Heinlein
Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.

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

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

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

Robert A. Heinlein