“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
Time Enough for Love (1973)
“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
Time Enough for Love (1973)
Revolt in 2100 (1953)
Context: Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil. Limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too.
1975 Statement to Judith Merrill, who had called herself a democrat and a libertarian, stating that such terms described him as well, as quoted in Robert A. Heinlein : In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better | 1948-1988 (2014), p. 389
Context: I think that describes me, too — still a democrat not because I love the Common Peepul and not because I think democracy is so successful (look around you) but, because in a lifetime of thinking about it and learning all that I could, I haven't found any other political organization that worked as well.
As for libertarian, I've been one all my life, a radical one. You might use the term "philosophical anarchist" or "autarchist" about me, but "libertarian" is easier to define and fits well enough.
Source: Stranger in a Strange Land
“Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.”
Source: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Source: I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Chapter 2, p. 35
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)
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.
Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 24 (p. 127)
“The death rate is the same for us as for anybody … one person, one death, sooner or later.”
Tunnel in the Sky (1955), Captain Helen Walker, Ch. 2
"Jubal Harshaw"
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961; 1991)
Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 2, “The Green-Eyed Monster” (p. 21)
Source: Starman Jones (1953), Chapter 9, “Chartman Jones” (p. 95)
Source: Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), Chapter 7
Methuselah’s Children (p. 535)
Short fiction, The Past Through Tomorrow (1967)
Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 10 (p. 58)
Source: Red Planet (1949), Chapter 10, “We’re Boxed In!”, p. 148
Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter XLVIII : L’Envoi or Rev. XXII: 13, p. 486