Robert A. Heinlein - Starship Troopers

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You got the impression that he never needed to sleep - just ten-thousand-mile checkups and dust him off occasionally.

Robert A. Heinlein
Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them.

Robert A. Heinlein
Pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival.

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

Robert A. Heinlein
Correct morality can only be derived from what man is — not from what do-gooders and well-meaning aunt Nellies would like him to be.

Robert A. Heinlein
If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off?

Robert A. Heinlein
Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don't walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don't know how to describe it, but it's much more complex and utterly delightful. They don't move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions... and all of it graceful.

Robert A. Heinlein
Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.

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
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.

Robert A. Heinlein
On the steps of the Federal Building we ran into Carmencita Ibanez, a classmate of ours and one of the nice things about being a member of a race with two sexes.

Robert A. Heinlein
There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.

Robert A. Heinlein
Any group is weaker than a man alone unless they are perfectly trained to work together.

Robert A. Heinlein
Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part...and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.

Robert A. Heinlein
We learned not to waste ammo even on warriors except in self-protection

Robert A. Heinlein
Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination— devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues — which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out.

Robert A. Heinlein
Morals — all correct moral laws — derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

Robert A. Heinlein