Top 100 Robert A. Heinlein Quotes
#1. You're not privileged to call me 'Boss'; you're not tax deductible.
Robert A. Heinlein
#4. It takes two to create a heaven, but hell can be accomplished by one.
Robert A. Heinlein
#5. Once you get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system.
Robert A. Heinlein
#8. Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.
Robert A. Heinlein
#9. Age does not bring wisdom, Ben, but it does give perspective ... and the saddest sight of all is to see, far behind you, temptations you've resisted.
Robert A. Heinlein
#10. You know the classification of cultures into 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian.
Robert A. Heinlein
#11. Oh, you have to charge 'em, Jubal. The marks won't pay attention if it's free.
Robert A. Heinlein
#12. Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is
so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.
Robert A. Heinlein
#13. Do you know your Bible?'
'Uh, not very well.'
'It merits study, it contains very practical advice for most emergencies.
Robert A. Heinlein
#14. An infantryman can fight only if somebody else delivers him to his zone; in a way I suppose pilots are just as essential as we are.
Robert A. Heinlein
#16. ("intelligence" in the military meaning; a man in a suit can be just as stupid as anybody else - only he had better not be),
Robert A. Heinlein
#17. Answered his telephone himself if he happened to be at hand when it signalled because each call offered good odds that he would be justified in being gratifyingly rude to some stranger for daring to invade his privacy without cause - "cause" by Harshaw's definition, not by the stranger's.
Robert A. Heinlein
#19. Well, I'll stick to the Old Testament, picking it to pieces usually doesn't upset people quite so much.
Robert A. Heinlein
#21. I had no sympathy for him and still haven't. That old saw about "To understand all is to forgive all" is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them.
Robert A. Heinlein
#22. Formal courtesy between husband and wife is even more important than it is between strangers.
Robert A. Heinlein
#25. Minds me of a married woman who was very proud of her virtue. She slept with other men only when her husband was away.
Robert A. Heinlein
#27. Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself.
Robert A. Heinlein
#28. I often calculate odds on horse races; the civil service computermen frequently program such requests. But the results are so at variance with expectations that I have concluded either that the data is too meager, or the horses or riders are not honest. Possibly all three.
Robert A. Heinlein
#29. Back to these young criminals - They probably were not spanked as babies; they certainly were not flogged for their crimes.
Robert A. Heinlein
#30. The future is better than the past. Despite the crepe hangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands ... with tools ... with horse sense and science and engineering.
Robert A. Heinlein
#32. the government' - that's too sweeping a term. 'The government' is several million people, nearly a million in Washington alone. We have to ask ourselves: Whose toes were being stepped on? What person or persons? Not 'the government' - but what individuals?
Robert A. Heinlein
#34. But their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was to die and let younger minds, still limber, take over.
Robert A. Heinlein
#35. Sex, whatever else it is, is an athletic skill. The more you practice, the more you can, the more you want to, the more you enjoy it, the less it tires you.
Robert A. Heinlein
#36. We have our hands, we have our brains, we have the challenge all around us, and we have within (from whatever source) the will to strive. That is enough; there is no need to assert 'belief' in that which we do not, as yet, know.
Robert A. Heinlein
#37. I'm a professional bad example. You can learn a lot by watching me. Or listening to me. Either one.
Robert A. Heinlein
#38. 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.
Robert A. Heinlein
#39. You can't believe what a lovely planet we have until you see her from outside.
Robert A. Heinlein
#40. The word 'love' designates a subjective condition in which the welfare and happiness of another person are essential to one's own happiness.
Robert A. Heinlein
#41. Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.
Robert A. Heinlein
#43. To be court-martialed - for any reason - is eight times as bad for an officer as for an enlisted man. Offenses which will get privates kicked out (maybe with lashes, possibly without) rate death in an officer. Better never to have been born!
Robert A. Heinlein
#44. Captain, that's not your style; you don't want to make money, you simply want to have money - in order to spend it.
Robert A. Heinlein
#45. Jill: 'I don't pay attention to politics.'
Ben: 'You should. It's barely less important than your own heart beat.'
Jill: 'I don't pay attention to that, either.
Robert A. Heinlein
#46. We each have a moral obligation to conserve and preserve beauty in this world; there is none to waste.
Robert A. Heinlein
#48. It was better to live with disappointment and frustration than to live without hope.
Robert A. Heinlein
#49. Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.
Robert A. Heinlein
#50. Call it that if you like. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.
Robert A. Heinlein
#51. Sit back down - and for God's sake quit trying to be as nasty as I am; you don't have my years of practice.
Robert A. Heinlein
#52. A friend who offers help without asking for explanations is a treasure beyond price.
Robert A. Heinlein
#53. Smith felt distressed at the failure to respond in kind and interpreted it as failure on his own part. He realized miserably that, time after time, he had managed to bring agitation to these other creatures when his purpose had been to create oneness.
Robert A. Heinlein
#54. Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. Another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pu
Robert A. Heinlein
#55. All three of us are prisoners of our early indoctrinations, for it is hard, very nearly impossible, to shake off one's earliest training.
Robert A. Heinlein
#58. To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
Robert A. Heinlein
#59. Fact was, little Carmen was so ornamental that you just never thought about her being useful.
Robert A. Heinlein
#60. 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.
Robert A. Heinlein
#61. 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.
Robert A. Heinlein
#63. Duke, almost the only human characteristic Mike seems to possess is an overwhelming desire to be liked.
Robert A. Heinlein
#64. A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
Robert A. Heinlein
#66. Her calculations were sometimes a little fuzzy, for the same reason that her checkbook sometimes did not balance; Becky Vesey (as she had been known as a child) had never really mastered the multiplication tables and she was inclined to confuse sevens with nines.
Robert A. Heinlein
#67. The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war's desolation.
Robert A. Heinlein
#69. That God is in truth the sort of bloodthirsty paranoid Who would rend to bits forty-two children for the crime of sassing one of his priests. Don't ask me about the Front Office's policies; I just work here.
Robert A. Heinlein
#70. The verdict to be passed on the third planet around Sol was never in doubt.
Robert A. Heinlein
#71. Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
Robert A. Heinlein
#72. Men rarely if ever dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
Robert A. Heinlein
#73. If men were the automatons that behaviorists claim they are, the behaviorist psychologists could not have invented the amazing nonsense called 'behaviorist psychology.'
Robert A. Heinlein
#75. good luck' follows careful preparation; 'bad luck' comes from sloppiness.
Robert A. Heinlein
#76. It is impossible for anyone to be responsible for another person's behavior. The most you or any leader can do is to encourage each one to be responsible for himself.
Robert A. Heinlein
#77. Eighty million steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speeds, are more destructive than war.
Robert A. Heinlein
#79. A skunk is better company than a person who prides himself on being 'frank'.
Robert A. Heinlein
#80. We came here for a small, informal meeting. We find you've turned it into a circus. Well, if you're going to have a circus, you've got to have elephants.
Robert A. Heinlein
#81. Coffee comes in five descending stages: Coffee, Java, Jamoke, Joe, and Carbon Remover.
Robert A. Heinlein
#82. It is said that God notes each sparrow that falls. And so He does. But the proper closest statement of it that can be made in English is that God cannot avoid noting the sparrow because the Sparrow is God. And when a cat stalks a sparrow both of them are God, carrying out God's thoughts.
Robert A. Heinlein
#83. Anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly.
Robert A. Heinlein
#84. Never encourage a man to cook breakfast; it cause him to wonder if women are necessary.
Robert A. Heinlein
#85. A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" - find out how he feels about astrology.
Robert A. Heinlein
#86. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion ... and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself - ultimate cost for perfect value.
Robert A. Heinlein
#87. 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.
Robert A. Heinlein
#89. What we think of as 'Physical beauty' is almost certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness intelligence among them.
Robert A. Heinlein
#90. He knew vaguely that he did not want the nurse to die at that moment, even though it was certainly its right and possibly its obligation to do so.
Robert A. Heinlein
#92. Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.
Robert A. Heinlein
#93. They were all three amazingly beautiful; they were also amazingly good secretaries. In Harshaw's opinion the principle of least action required that utility and beauty be combined.
Robert A. Heinlein
#94. A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is ... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be ... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive
Robert A. Heinlein
#95. A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.
Robert A. Heinlein
#96. Smith used English as one might use a code book, with tedious and imperfect translation for each symbol.
Robert A. Heinlein
#97. But I contend that the disgusting behavior of many of their alleged 'holy men' relieves us of any intellectual obligation to take the stuff seriously. No amount of sanctimonious rationalization can make such behavior anything but pathological.
Robert A. Heinlein
#98. In the course of nearly a century of gusty living he had been broke many times, had several times been wealthier than he now was; he regarded both conditions as he did shifts in the weather, and never counted his change.
Robert A. Heinlein
#99. There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?
Robert A. Heinlein
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