Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

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“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.”

“A boy who gets a C- in 'Appreciation of Television' can't be all bad.”

“Certain types of loudmouthism should be a capital offense among decent people.”

“Gratitude is a euphemism for resentment.”

“A community where everyone is a ruthless murderer, with handy access to death-dealing devices, is a very polite community.”

“Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.”

“The price of freedom is the willingness to do sudden battle anywhere, any time and with utter recklessness.”

“It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can't be enforced weakens all other laws.”

“A motion to adjourn is always in order.”

“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.”

“A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.”

“Nor would anybody suspect. If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor.”

“Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.”

“I woke up in bed with a man and a cat. The man was a stranger; the cat was not”

“The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally.”

“The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion… and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself - ultimate cost for perfect value.”

“As it says in the Bible, God fights on the side with the heaviest artillery.”

“A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human 'wisdom'… and the other twenty percent isn't very important.”

“Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.”

“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.”

“Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden.”

“Well, I suppose it did.”

“A Paradox May Be Paradoctored.”

“What we think of as ‘Physical beauty’ is almost certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness—intelligence—among them.”

“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.”

“Precedent is merely the assumption that somebody else, in the past with less information, nevertheless knows better than the man on the spot.”

“Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards.”

“Gravity’s books have got to balance.”

“Sometimes I think,” he told Tex, “that Th’Wing thinks that I am an idiot studying hard to become a moron—but flunking the course.”

“I had taken a partner once before—but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open.”

“Don’t pay any attention to what she says. Half of it’s always wrong and she doesn’t mean the rest.”

“Babies are fun. And they’re not much trouble. Feed ‘em occasionally, help them when they need it, and love them a lot. That’s all there is to it.”

“Son, suppose you tend to your knitting and I tend to mine.”

“Nobody ever wins a lawsuit but the lawyers.”

“I think the major problem in growing up is to become sophisticated without becoming cynical.”

“My old man claimed that the more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels.”

“Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.”

“Never encourage a man to cook breakfast; it causes him to wonder if women are necessary. If you always get his breakfast and don’t raise controversial issues until after his second cup of coffee, you can get away with murder the rest of the time. They don’t notice other odors when they smell bacon.”

“The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship.”

“By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget—especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself—that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen.”

“He considered horoscopes as silly as spectacles on a cow.”

“The Almighty-God idea came under attack because it explained nothing; it simply pushed all explanations one stage farther away. In the nineteenth century atheistic positivism started displacing the Almighty-God notion in that minority of the population that bathed regularly. Atheism had a limited run, as it, too, explains nothing, being merely Godism turned upside down.”

“Never listen to newscasts. Saves wear and tear on the nervous system.”

“Everybody has a skeleton in the closet; the thing is to keep ’em there and not at the feast.”

“Like searching at midnight in a dark cellar for a black cat that isn’t there.”

“Mercifully, we stay our hand. Earth’s cities will not be bombed. The free citizens of Venus Republic have no wish to slaughter their cousins still on Terra. Our only purpose is to establish our own independence, to manage our own affairs, to throw off the crushing yoke of absentee ownership and taxation without representation which has bleed us poor.
In doing so, in so taking our stand as free men, we call on all oppressed and impoverished nations everywhere to follow our lead, accept our help. Look up into the sky! Swimming there above you is the very station from which I now address you. The fat and stupid rulers of the Federation have made of Circum-Terra an overseer’s whip. The threat of this military base in the sky has protected their empire from the just wrath of their victims for more then five score years.
We now crush it.
In a matter of minutes this scandal in the clean skies, this pistol pointed at the heads of men everywhere on your planet, will cease to exist. Step out of doors, watch the sky. Watch a new sun blaze briefly, and know that its light is the light of Liberty inviting all of Earth to free itself.
Subject peoples of Earth, we free men of the free Republic of Venus salute you with that sign!”

“Aside from a cold appreciation of my own genius I felt that I was a modest man.”

“I knew that the stupidest students, the silliest professors, and the worst bull courses are concentrated in schools of education.”

“One can’t expect logic from males; they think with their testicles and act from their emotions.”