Robert A. Heinlein - Human Quotes

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There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk "his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown children, can never be anything else.

Robert A. Heinlein
Almost everything about a human creature is ridiculous, except its ability to suffer bravely and die gallantly for whatever it loves and believes in. The validity of that belief, the appropriateness of that love, is irrelevant; it is the bravery and the gallantry that count.

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
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
In this complex world, science, the scientific method, and the consequences of the scientific method are central to everything the human race is doing and to wherever we are going. If we blow ourselves up we will do it by misapplication of science; if we manage to keep from blowing ourselves up, it will be through intelligent application of science.

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
I don't see why human people make such a heavy trip out of sex. It isn't anything complex, it is simply the best thing in life, even better than food.

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
Humans hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn - when they do, which isn't often - on their own, the hard way.

Robert A. Heinlein
A rational anarchist believes that concepts, such as "state" and "society" and "government" have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame... as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world... aware that his efforts will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.

Robert A. Heinlein
Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good.

Robert A. Heinlein
All normal human beings have soi-disant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts: those who know this and those who do not.

Robert A. Heinlein
Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation... whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce — render emotional — his audience, each time.

Robert A. Heinlein
The future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands... with tools... with horse sense and science and engineering.

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
The two highest achievements of the human mind are the twin concepts of "loyalty" and "duty". Whenever these twin concepts fall into disrepute, get out of there fast! You may possibly save yourself, but it is too late to save that society. It is doomed.

Robert A. Heinlein
All human behavior, all human motivations, all man's hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind's tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.

Robert A. Heinlein
Of all the strange "crimes" that human beings have legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy" is the most amazing, with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for second and third place.

Robert A. Heinlein
The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.

Robert A. Heinlein
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

Robert A. Heinlein
The Great Egg must love human beings, he made a lot of them.
Same argument applies to oysters, only more so.

Robert A. Heinlein
Touch is the most fundamental sense. A baby experiences it, all over, before he is born and long before he learns to use sight, hearing, or taste, and no human ever ceases to need it. Keep your children short on pocket money but long on hugs

Robert A. Heinlein
Sharpie, you've got a one-track mind.
It's the main track. Reproduction is the main track; the methods and mores of sexual copulation are the central feature of all higher developments of life.
You're ignoring money and television.
Piffle! All human activities including scientific research are either mating dances and care of the young, or the dismal sublimations of born losers in the only game in town.

Robert A. Heinlein
Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings... but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.

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

Robert A. Heinlein
English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing.

Robert A. Heinlein
Death isn't funny." "Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.

Robert A. Heinlein
The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Robert A. Heinlein
At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that news is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived and that he himself is no different—in the crunch his life depends on his agility, alertness, and personal resourcefulness.

Robert A. Heinlein
Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.

Robert A. Heinlein