Robert A. Heinlein Quotes (138 Quotes)

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

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.

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

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

To permit irresponsible authority is to sell disaster.

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

Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit

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

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

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.

Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.

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.

Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.

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

Any group is weaker than a man alone unless they are perfectly trained to work together.

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

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.

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

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.

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

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.

But, do you know, once you get used to it's rather cute. I mean, if a girl looks alright to start with, she still looks alright with her head smooth.

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

One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die ...and accepts his sentence undismayed.

We learned not to waste ammo even on warriors except in self-protection

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.

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.

There is no safety this side of the grave

Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don't walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don't know how to describe it, but it's much more complex and utterly delightful. They don't move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions . . . and all of it graceful.

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