Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” Quotes (46 Quotes)

Gratitude is a euphemism for resentment.

My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.

With just a touch more self confidence and a liberal helping of ignorance I could have been a famous evangelist.

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.

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.

He was delighted to recognize his own human name on two of the papers; he always got an odd thrill out of reading it, as if he were two places at once.

Stinky says women should be obscene but not heard.

A little more money won't do you any good - because daughters can use up ten percent more than a man can make in any normal occupation, regardless of the amount.

He's an honest politician--he stays bought.

Straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in all law schools.

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.

He's as weird as snake's suspenders but sweet as a stolen kiss, too.

Support for the arts -- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

Audacity, always audacity - soundest principal of strategy.

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

Talking with a Martian is something like talking with an echo. You don't get any argument but you don't get results either.

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

I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth--then shut up.

That's a subject as safe as being in favor of Christmas.

Being sorry won't get you into heaven. Get happy, son. Get that old spring into your step and stay on your toes.

I never do anything I don't want to do. Nor does anyone, but in my case I am always aware of it.

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

But one way or another competing and weeding takes place . . . or a race goes downhill.

If I don't start having service I'm going to swap you all for a dog and shoot the dog.

The golden sunshine of Italy congealed into tears. Here's to alcoholic brotherhood ... much more suited to the frail human soul, if any, than any other sort.

Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit

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

The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.

Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.

I'm always suspicious of disinterested interest.

The verdict to be passed on the third planet around Sol was never in doubt.

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

In the twentieth century, nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America---and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it.

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.

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.

It would take centuries and he must grow and grow and grow, but he was in no hurry--he grokked that Eternity and the ever-beautifully-changing Now were identical.

There is no safety this side of the grave

Do-gooding is like treating hemophilia - the real cure is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death...before they breed more hemophiliacs.

Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.

Thinking doesn't pay. Just makes you discontented with what you see around you.

Dorcas, you already reek like a Marseilles cat house; don't wheedle Mike for more stinkum.

Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive.

Thou art god, I am god. All that groks is god.

English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it.

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.

To support his austerely upholstered nest and its rabble staff he put forth minimum effort for maximum return simply because it was easier to be rich than to be poor - Harshaw merely wished to live exactly as he liked, doing whatever he thought was best for him.