Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

502 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
From the strictest humanitarian viewpoint, any attempt to stop the processes by which over crowded cities purge themselves is not a kindness.

Robert A. Heinlein
I knew that the stupidest students, the silliest professors, and the worst bull courses are concentrated in schools of education.

Robert A. Heinlein
The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for—if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.

Robert A. Heinlein
And suddenly I knew I was people and could not stop laughing.

Robert A. Heinlein
I've never understood how God could expect His creatures to pick the one true religion by faith-it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.

Robert A. Heinlein