Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

502 Sourced Quotes

More than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest.

Robert A. Heinlein
No matter where or what, there are makers, takers, and fakers.

Robert A. Heinlein
At fourteen months he began speaking in sentences, short and of his own structure, but sentences. The subjects of his conversation, or, rather, his statements, were consistently egocentric. Normal again—no one expects an infant to write essays on the beauties of altruism.

Robert A. Heinlein
Remember though, your best weapon is between your ears and under your scalp -provided it's loaded.

Robert A. Heinlein
'Magic,' I stated, is a symbol for any process not understood.

Robert A. Heinlein
There is no subject inappropriate for scientific research. Johann, we've let you fellows have a monopoly of such matters for too long. The most serious questions in the world have been left to faith or speculation. It is time for scientists to cope with them, or admit that science is no more than pebble counting.

Robert A. Heinlein
A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!

Robert A. Heinlein
What of it? I'd still be myself. I don't care what people think.
You're mistaken, son. To believe that you can live free of your cultural matrix is one of the easiest fallacies and has some of the worst consequences. You are part of your group whether you like it or not, and you are bound by its customs.

Robert A. Heinlein
I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious.

Robert A. Heinlein
Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

Robert A. Heinlein
There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.

Robert A. Heinlein
When a fact came along, he junked theories that failed to match.

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

Robert A. Heinlein
Whether the authorities be invaders or merely local tyrants, the effect of such [gun control] laws is to place the individual at the mercy of the state, unable to resist.

Robert A. Heinlein
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" - find out how he feels about astrology.

Robert A. Heinlein
Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.

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
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
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.

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

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
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