Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

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Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Robert A. Heinlein
Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight.

Robert A. Heinlein
We came here for a small, informal meeting. We find you've turned it into a circus. Well, if you're going to have a circus, you've got to have elephants.

Robert A. Heinlein
The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.

Robert A. Heinlein
Never trust machinery more complicated than a knife and fork.

Robert A. Heinlein
Democracy's worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents.

Robert A. Heinlein
In the eighty or ninety years I have given to this subject, trying to trace out the meanderings of their twisty little minds, the only thing that I have learned for certain about women is that when a gal is gonna, she's gonna. All a man can do is cooperate with the inevitable.

Robert A. Heinlein
Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.

Robert A. Heinlein
Contemplation must bring forth right action in order to permit further growth.

Robert A. Heinlein
Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of single-minded devotion to acquiring it and making it grow into more money.

Robert A. Heinlein
There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.

Robert A. Heinlein
The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people; I was saved, they were damned.... Our hymns were loaded with arrogance - self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what hell everybody else would catch come Judgment Day.

Robert A. Heinlein
Of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to, every time. If it pains them to make a choice - if the choice looks like a 'sacrifice' - you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness... the necessity of deciding between two things you want when you can't have both.

Robert A. Heinlein
Please don't invent a debt that does not exist, or next you will be trying to feel gratitude - and that is the treacherous first step toward complete moral degradation.

Robert A. Heinlein
You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets fretful. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.

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
It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn... they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything—obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

Robert A. Heinlein
Do-gooding is like treating hemophilia - the real cure is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death...before they breed more hemophiliacs.

Robert A. Heinlein
The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for—if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.

Robert A. Heinlein
And suddenly I knew I was people and could not stop laughing.

Robert A. Heinlein
I've never understood how God could expect His creatures to pick the one true religion by faith-it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.

Robert A. Heinlein
With eternity to draw on there could be no reason for hurrying - 'hurry' was not a concept in Martian.

Robert A. Heinlein
Have you ever known me to be rude to a lady?" "I have seen you be intentionally rude to a woman. I have never seen you be rude to a lady.

Robert A. Heinlein
Hate always sells well, but for repeat trade and the long pull happiness is sounder merchandise.

Robert A. Heinlein
Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good." He wished that government would wander off and get lost!

Robert A. Heinlein
Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.

Robert A. Heinlein
But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

Robert A. Heinlein
But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing, I became too stink in' proud to use the title. I won't touch watered whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees.

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
Self awareness is NOT just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

Robert A. Heinlein