Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

502 Sourced Quotes

In Wilson's scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person.

Robert A. Heinlein
It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired.

Robert A. Heinlein
A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking.

Robert A. Heinlein