Robert A. Heinlein Quotes (138 Quotes)

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

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.

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally.

Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.

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.

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

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

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.

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.

Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.

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.

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

Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination-- devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues -- which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out.

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.

The bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids arenÆt even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madmanÆs conception of a giant intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive.

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

There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.

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.

To permit irresponsible authority is to sell disaster.

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.

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.

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.