Robert A. Heinlein Quotes (138 Quotes)

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

You got the impression that he never needed to sleep - just ten-thousand-mile checkups and dust him off occasionally.

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.

Certain types of loudmouthism should be a capital offense among decent people.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.