Robert A. Heinlein (1907 – 1988)
One of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of science fiction of the 20th Century.
Women seem to have almost unlimited capacity for forgiveness. (Since it is usually a man who needs forgiveness, this must be a racial survival trait.)
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. p.248
I have never been able to see life as anything but a vast complicated practical joke, and it’s better to laugh than cry.
Cats have no sense of humor, they have terribly inflated egos, and they are very touchy.
Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven.
Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good.
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool.)
All men are created unequal.
What we think of as ‘Physical beauty’ is almost certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness—intelligence—among them.
This is the great day. This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race, up to this time. That is — today is New Year's Day of the Year One. If we don't change the calendar, historians will do so. The human race — this is our change, our puberty rite, bar mitzvah, confirmation, from the change of our infancy into adulthood for the human race. And we're going to go on out, not only to the Moon, to the stars; we're going to spread. I don't know that the United States is going to do it; I hope so. I have — I'm an American myself; I want it to be done by us. But in any case, the human race is going to do it, it's utterly inevitable: we're going to spread through the entire universe.
Son, suppose you tend to your knitting and I tend to mine.
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man.
But it's lovely work if you can stomach it.
If the human animal has any value at all, he is too valuable to be property. If he has an inner dignity, he is much too proud to own other men. I don't give a damn how scrubbed and perfumed he may be, a slave owner is subhuman.
A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.
Friday, don't despise assassins indiscriminately. As with any tool, merit or demerit lies in how it is used.
I counted to ten slowly, using binary notation.
Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way.