Robert A. Heinlein (1907 – 1988)
One of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of science fiction of the 20th Century.
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.
Son, suppose you tend to your knitting and I tend to mine.
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.
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.
From my point of view it is better to be alive and young again, and broke, than it is to be the richest corpse in Forest Lawn.
Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.
By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget—especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself—that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen.
Avoid making irrevocable decisions while tired or hungry. N.B.: Circumstances can force your hand. So think ahead!
The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it — once you can honestly say, "I don't know", then it becomes possible to get at the truth.
Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.
There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.
The two highest achievements of the human mind are the twin concepts of "loyalty" and "duty." Whenever these twin concepts fall into disrepute — get out of there fast! You may possibly save yourself, but it is too late to save that society. It is doomed.
Decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries — but it is a force stronger than crime.
I believe in the patient gallantry of nurses...in the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that goes on quietly in almost every home in the land.
Pessimist by policy, optimist by temperament — it is possible to be both. How? By never taking an unnecessary chance and by minimizing risks you can’t avoid. This permits you to play out the game happily, untroubled by the certainty of the outcome.
There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk "his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown children, can never be anything else.
Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure "good" government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the "backseat-driver syndrome."
I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea.