Robert A. Heinlein - Free Quotes

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I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

Robert A. Heinlein
Oh, you have to charge 'em, Jubal. The marks won't pay attention if it's free.

Robert A. Heinlein
Random numbers are to a computer what free will is to a human being.

Robert A. Heinlein
Masturbation is cheap, clean, convenient, and free of any possibility of wrongdoing —and you don't have to go home in the cold. But it's lonely.

Robert A. Heinlein
Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events.

Robert A. Heinlein
Ben, the ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with — in the face of a preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called "morals." Most of us know the code is wrong; almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck.
You, too, Ben. You fancy yourself a free soul — and break that evil code. But faced with a problem in sexual ethics new to you, you tested it against that same Judeo-Christian code... so automatically your stomach did flip-flops... and you think that proves you're right and they're wrong. Faugh! I'd as lief use trial by ordeal.

Robert A. Heinlein
I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don't think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say : Let the damned thing go down the drain!

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
He posed me a question which I must answer correctly—else he will not co-operate.
Huh? What was the question?
I'll ask you. Martha, what is the meaning of life?
What! Why, what a stupid question!
He did not ask it stupidly.
It's a psychopathic question, unlimited, unanswerable, and, in all probability, sense free.

Robert A. Heinlein
I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

Robert A. Heinlein
Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

Robert A. Heinlein
Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.

Robert A. Heinlein
Anything free costs twice as much in the long run or turns out worthless.

Robert A. Heinlein
Mathematics can never prove anything. No mathematics has any content. All any mathematics can do is — sometimes — turn out to be useful in describing some aspects of our so-called "physical universe." That is a bonus; most forms of mathematics are as meaning-free as chess.

Robert A. Heinlein