Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.

1229

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

1991

Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.

1968

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

2566

Some people insist that 'mediocre' is better than 'best.' They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can't fly. They despise brains because they have none.

2354

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

2404

Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.

4011

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

4388

Be wary of strong drink, it can make you shoot at the tax collector...and miss.

3833

Women talk when they want to. Or don't.

3306

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

3466

If you've got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn't prove it.

1231

A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom.

3790

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

1255

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

2311

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.

2641

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.

3146

That God is in truth the sort of bloodthirsty paranoid Who would rend to bits forty-two children for the crime of sassing one of his priests. Don't ask me about the Front Office's policies; I just work here.

3068

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

2654

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

4447

Once can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.

4646

One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.

4577

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.

2645

Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.

4395

One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.

4645

Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.

1307

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.

3369

Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.

2171

People simplify 'Apollonian' into 'mild', and 'calm', and 'cool'. But 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin-a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox.

1386

The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

3120

Men are not potatoes!

3042

Sex, whatever else it is, is an athletic skill. The more you practice, the more you can, the more you want to, the more you enjoy it, the less it tires you.

3473

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

4147

Yes, sir, there are things to see and do on the French Riviera without spending money.

3416

It's a long story. Want a refill?"
"No, let's start the steak. Where's the button?"
"Right here."
"Well, push it."
"Me? You offered to cook."
"Ben Caxton, I will lie here and starve before I will get up to push a button six inches from your finger"
"As you wish." He pressed the button. "But don't forget who cooked dinner.

4370

I'm too much old-timer to be rude to a woman no matter what - they have so much of what we have none of.

3521

I waited. Women talk when they want to. Or don't.

3421

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. [He is also a fool.]

1381

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.

1349

He had learned that close-held secrets could often be cracked by going all the way to the top and there making himself unbearably unpleasant. He knew that such twisting of the tiger's tail was dangerous, for he understood the psychopathology of great power.

1416

Remind me," Jubal said to her, "to write a popular article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to tthe unecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the toubles and sins of five billion strangers. The title is 'Gossip Unlimited' - no, make that 'Gossip Gone Wild.'

1258

Butterflies are self propelled flowers.

2658

I was there to see beautiful naked women. So was everybody else. It's a common failing.

2940

Anne is God. I am God. The happy grass are God, Jill groks in beauty always. Jill is God. All shaping and making and creating together.

4153

Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman's breasts; it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy.

4036

Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary.

3603

Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules about sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.

4777

I don't see why human people make such a heavy trip out of sex. It isn't anything complex, it is simply the best thing in life, even better than food.

1132

Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.

3347

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.

3088

Darling, a true lady takes off her dignity with her clothes and does her whorish best. At other times you can be as modest and dignified as your persona requires.

3763

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.

1880

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.

1511

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.

4328

Abstract design is all right - for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity or terror, which is not abstract at all but very human.

4105

Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times

2640

A generation which ignores history has no past - and no future.

1760

History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion - ie., none to speak of

2621

A woman is not property, and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dreamworld.

1247

I know why we laugh. We laugh because it hurts, and it's the only thing to make it stop hurting.

3423

Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate - and quickly.

2506

TANSTAAFL: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

4483

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

1182

Secrecy begets tyranny.

1855

Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category with the classic example 'a little bit pregnant.

1553

Property is not the natural and obvious and inevitable concept that most people think it is.

1195

Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds.

1162

Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.

4395

Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.

3423

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.

1464

Ben, why should anybody want that much power?"
"Why does a moth fly toward light?

4942

He became convinced that ordinary commercial financing could be done for a service charge plus an insurance fee amounting to much less that the current rates of interest charged by banks, whose rates were based on supply and demand, treating money as a commodity rather than as a sovereign state's means of exchange.

4032

Daughters can spend ten percent more than a man can make in any usual occupation. That’s a law of nature, to be known henceforth as ‘Harshaw’s Law.

2759

A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

1817

A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.

3400

Customs, morals-is there a difference?

4670

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist's view, 'justice' is a search for workable customs.

4861

The drive for power is even less logical than the sex urge . . . and stronger.

1564

Oh, you have to charge 'em, Jubal. The marks won't pay attention if it's free.

1809

Belief gets in the way of learning.

1447