1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein Quotes
page 5

Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", his sometimes controversial works continue to have an influential effect on the genre, and on modern culture more generally.

Heinlein became one of the first American science fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science fiction novelists for many decades, and he, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are often considered the "Big Three" of English-language science fiction authors. Among his most notable works are Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, which helped create the space marine and mecha archetypes, and the libertarian novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

A writer also of numerous science fiction short stories, Heinlein was one of a group of writers who came to prominence under the editorship of John W. Campbell at his Astounding Science Fiction magazine; however, Heinlein denied that Campbell influenced his writing to any great degree.

Within the framework of his science fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly addressed certain social themes: the importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress nonconformist thought. He also speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices.

Heinlein was named the first Science Fiction Writers Grand Master in 1974. He won Hugo Awards for four of his novels; in addition, fifty years after publication, five of his works were awarded "Retro Hugos"—awards given retrospectively for works that were published before the Hugo Awards came into existence. In his fiction, Heinlein coined terms that have become part of the English language, including "grok", "waldo", and "speculative fiction", as well as popularizing existing terms like "TANSTAAFL", "pay it forward", and "space marine". He also anticipated mechanical computer aided design with "Drafting Dan" and described a modern version of a waterbed in his novel The Door into Summer, though he never patented or built one. In the first chapter of the novel Space Cadet he anticipated the cell-phone, 35 years before Motorola invented the technology. Several of Heinlein's works have been adapted for film and television.

✵ 7. July 1907 – 8. May 1988  •  Other names Robert Heinlein, Роберт Энсон Хайнлайн
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Robert A. Heinlein: 557 quotes68 likes

Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

“Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?”

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 book Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers (1959)

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

Source: Starship Troopers

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

Robert A. Heinlein book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Source: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“Gratitude is a euphemism for resentment.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

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

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Source: Time Enough for Love

“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.”

Robert A. Heinlein

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Friday

Source: Friday

“A motion to adjourn is always in order.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Source: Time Enough for Love

“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 book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

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

Robert A. Heinlein

“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.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Source: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Friday

Source: Friday

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

Robert A. Heinlein book The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

Source: The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

“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.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

Source: Starship Troopers

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

Robert A. Heinlein book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Source: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“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.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

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

Robert A. Heinlein book The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)

“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 book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

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

Robert A. Heinlein book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Source: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“Well, I suppose it did.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers

“A Paradox May Be Paradoctored.”

Robert A. Heinlein book "—All You Zombies—"

"—All You Zombies—" (1958)
Variant: 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.”

Robert A. Heinlein book I Will Fear No Evil

Source: I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Chapter 2, p. 35

“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

In a live interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS News, on the day of the first moonwalk (20 July 1969)
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century, Volume I (1907–1949): Learning Curve (2010)

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Space Cadet

Source: Space Cadet (1948), Chapter 15 “Pie With a Fork”, p. 180

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

Robert A. Heinlein

The Pragmatics of Patriotism (1973)

“Gravity’s books have got to balance.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Farmer in the Sky

Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 17, “Disaster” (p. 177)

“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.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Space Cadet

Source: Space Cadet (1948), Chapter 16 “P.R.S. Astarte”, p. 195

“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.”

Robert A. Heinlein

Source: The Door Into Summer (1957), Chapter 10

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

Robert A. Heinlein

The Menace from Earth (p. 351)
Short fiction, The Past Through Tomorrow (1967)

“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.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Beyond This Horizon

Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 7, “Burn him down at once—”, p. 75

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Double Star

Double Star (1956)

“Nobody ever wins a lawsuit but the lawyers.”

Robert A. Heinlein

Source: The Door Into Summer (1957), Chapter 2

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

Robert A. Heinlein book I Will Fear No Evil

Source: I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Chapter 27, p. 473

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

Robert A. Heinlein

Source: The Door Into Summer (1957), Chapter 5

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

Robert A. Heinlein

Waldo & Magic, Inc. (1950)

“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.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Number of the Beast

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter V : “—a wedding ring is not a ring in my nose—”, p. 41

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

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Source: Time Enough for Love: the lives of Lazarus Long; a novel , (1973), p. 366

“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.”

Robert A. Heinlein

Source: The Door Into Summer (1957), Chapter 8

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Between Planets

Source: Between Planets (1951), Chapter 4, “The Glory Road” (p. 43)

“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.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

Source: The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), p. 564

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Red Planet

Source: Red Planet (1949), Chapter 2, “South Colony, Mars”, p. 17

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Starman Jones

Source: Starman Jones (1953), Chapter 10, “Garson’s Planet” (p. 109)

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Starman Jones

Source: Starman Jones (1953), Chapter 11, “Through the Cargo Hatch” (p. 115)

“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!”

Robert A. Heinlein book Between Planets

Source: Between Planets (1951), Chapter 6, “The Sign in the Sky” (p. 74) - Speech given before the destruction of the nuclear-armed satellite Circum-Terra.

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Double Star

Double Star (1956)

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

Robert A. Heinlein book The Number of the Beast

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter IX : Most males have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws., p. 82