Robert A. Heinlein citations

Page 8

“Il est plus facile de soulever mille hommes en s'adressant à leurs préjugés que d'en convaincre un seul à l'aide de la logique.”

“Je commençai à entrevoir que la base de toute tyrannie n'est pas tant la force que le secret, la dissimulation, la censure. Lorsqu'un gouvernement — ou une Église — dit à ses sujets : « Il ne faut pas lire ceci, il ne faut pas voir cela, il est interdit de savoir telle chose », il en résulte inévitablement une tyrannie, quels qu'aient été les mobiles primitifs. Il faut bien peu de force pour contrôler un homme dont l'esprit est ainsi déformé. En revanche, nulle violence ne peut venir à bout d'un esprit libre, ni la torture, ni les bombes à fission, rien… on ne peut pas soumettre un homme libre. On ne peut que le tuer.”

“Si la parole d'un homme n'est pas une garantie suffisante, sa signature ne vaudra pas davantage”

“Les femmes et les chats ne feront que ce qui leur plaît, et les hommes et les chiens doivent se détendre et s'habituer à cette idée..”

“If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off?”

“Every general prohibition creates its bootleggers.”

“His was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.”

“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?”

“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.”

“The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”

“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.”