Top 100 Heinlein's Quotes
#1. My old man says when it's time to be counted, the important thing is to be man enough to stand up.
Robert A. Heinlein
#2. You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.
Robert A. Heinlein
#3. The greatest fallacy of democracy is that everyone's opinion is worth the same.
Robert A. Heinlein
#4. Some people are ants by nature; they have to work, even when it's useless. Few people have a talent for constructive laziness.
Robert A. Heinlein
#6. Hit it! You have to hit it harder than that. Electrons are timid little things but notional; you have to let them know who's boss.
Robert A. Heinlein
#7. Because revolution - armed uprising - requires not only dissatisfaction but aggressiveness. A revolutionist has to be willing to fight and die - or he's just a parlor pink. If you separate out the aggressive ones and make them the sheep dogs, the sheep will never give you trouble.
Robert A. Heinlein
#8. The brown monkey's instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.
Robert A. Heinlein
#9. A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive - and nowhere else! - and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
Robert A. Heinlein
#10. We're simply trying to survive - and the first principle of survival is not to worry about the impossible and concentrate on what's possible.
Robert A. Heinlein
#11. I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces
with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way the government sticks its nose into everything now.
Robert A. Heinlein
#12. That's what I was trying to find out when we were rushed off on this damned safari. They have unusual intestinal flora and it may have something to do with that. But I think it has to do with the fact that they never stop growing.
Robert A. Heinlein
#13. I don't pay attention to politics." "You should. It's barely less important than your own heart beat." "I don't pay attention to that, either.
Robert A. Heinlein
#14. It's a shock to have it proved to you that you can't resist seducing yourself.
Robert A. Heinlein
#16. Daughters can spend ten percent more than a man can make in any usual occupation. That's a law of nature, to be known henceforth as 'Harshaw's Law.
Robert A. Heinlein
#17. In the eighty or ninety years I have given to this subject, trying to trace out the meanderings of their twisty little minds, the only thing that I have learned for certain about women is that when a gal is gonna, she's gonna. All a man can do is cooperate with the inevitable.
Robert A. Heinlein
#18. Oh, you have to charge 'em, Jubal. The marks won't pay attention if it's free.
Robert A. Heinlein
#19. 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
#20. I'm afraid of coaching, of writer's classes, of writer's magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble - you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step.
Robert A. Heinlein
#21. There's precious little choice." "There's always a choice! This one is a choice between 'bad' and 'worse - 'which is a difference much more poignant than that between 'good' and 'better.
Robert A. Heinlein
#22. One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.
George R R Martin
#23. It took you long enough to answer your phone." "It's my phone, Mr. Secretary. Sometimes I don't answer it at all.
Robert A. Heinlein
#24. I took up writing because I needed money. And I continued to write because it's safer than stealing and easier than working.
Robert A. Heinlein
#25. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force.
Robert A. Heinlein
#26. It's (Politics) rough and sometimes it's dirty and it's always hard work and tedious details. But it's the only sport for grownups.
Robert A. Heinlein
#27. 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
#28. It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.
Robert A. Heinlein
#29. Politics is not evil; politics is the human race's most magnificent achievement.
Robert A. Heinlein
#30. Congratulations! A desire not to butt into other people's business is eighty percent of all human wisdom." "You
Robert A. Heinlein
#31. It's not that easy. You can make omelet from eggs, but not eggs from omelet.
Robert A. Heinlein
#32. When he kisses you he isn't doing anything else. You're his whole universe, and the moment is eternal because he doesn't have any plans and isn't going anywhere. Just kissing you ... it's overwhelming.
Robert A. Heinlein
#33. Patriotism is not sentimental nonsense. Nor something dreamed up by demagogues. Patriotism is as necessary a part of man's evolutionary equipment as are his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual.
Robert A. Heinlein
#35. A man who marries at my age isn't taking a wife, he's indenturing a nurse.
Robert A. Heinlein
#36. It is almost impossible to shake of one's earliest training. Duke, can you get it through your skull that had you been brought up by Martians, you would have the same attitude toward eating and being eaten as Mike has.
Robert A. Heinlein
#37. 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.
Robert A. Heinlein
#38. There is no such thing as 'social gambling.' Either you are there to cut the other bloke's heart out and eat it
or you're a sucker. If you don't like this choice
don't gamble.
Robert A. Heinlein
#39. The very idea that the Chief would let anybody expose himself to danger in his place is-well, I ought to slap your face; that's what I ought to do!
Robert A. Heinlein
#40. I want to spit back at a camel and ask him what he's so sour about. Maybe camels are the real 'Old Ones' on this planet ... and that what is wrong with the place.
Robert A. Heinlein
#41. Specialization is for insects ... The race of man? He's a whole other creature.
Robert A. Heinlein
#42. Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it's eight times as good as any other method.
Robert A. Heinlein
#43. All revelations are personal, that's why all revelations are suspect.
Robert A. Heinlein
#44. In Wilson's scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality.
Robert A. Heinlein
#45. Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.
Robert A. Heinlein
#46. 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.
Robert A. Heinlein
#47. We came here for a quiet, small, informal meeting - strictly business. We find you've turned it into a circus. Well, if you're going to have a circus, you've got to have elephants and there's no two ways about it.
Robert A. Heinlein
#49. There ought not to be anything in the whole universe that man can't poke his nose into-that's the way we're built and I assume that there's some reason for that.
Robert A. Heinlein
#50. There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true.
Robert A. Heinlein
#51. 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
#52. A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it - it keeps him upright.
Robert A. Heinlein
#53. The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom. That's a personal evaluation, of course.
Robert A. Heinlein
#55. Thou art God'. It's not a message of cheer and hope. It's a defiance - and an unafraid, unabashed assumption of personal responsibility.
Robert A. Heinlein
#56. The mind's ability to rationalize it's own shortcomings is unlimited; I am no exception.
Robert A. Heinlein
#57. I don't pay much attention to politics."
"You should. It's barely less important than your own heart beat.
Robert A. Heinlein
#58. 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
#59. Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.
Robert A. Heinlein
#60. Heinlein's Rules for Writers
Rule One: You Must Write
Rule Two: Finish What Your Start
Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold
Robert A. Heinlein
#61. 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
#62. 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
#64. One might almost define intelligence as the level at which an aware organism demands, 'What's in it for me?
Robert A. Heinlein
#65. Everybody is equal. Everybody! That's the law."
"They are? Only from on top.
Robert A. Heinlein
#66. There's a way that money is freedom, but it isn't money, it's that money stands for having a choice.
Jo Walton
#67. Mom and Dad were bibliophiles. Dad shared his father's love of westerns, Mom favored the likes of Zelazny and Heinlein, Howard and Burroughs. We owned several hundred books stored in trunks that comprised our portable library.
Laird Barron
#68. When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
Robert A. Heinlein
#69. A verbalizing race has words for every old concept . . . and creates new words or new definitions for old words whenever a new concept comes along. Always! A nervous system that is able to verbalize cannot avoid verbalizing; it's automatic.
Robert A. Heinlein
#70. If you're not too busy this evening, why don't you bring your soft shoes and your pads over to officers' row and we'll go waltzing Matilda? Say about eight o'clock." "Yes, sir." "That's not an order, that's an invitation. If you really are slowing down,
Robert A. Heinlein
#71. 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
#72. That boy skates close to the edge, he always has. He's utterly fearless and that's how he's made his reputation. But the rabbit is never more than two jumps ahead of the coyote . .
Robert A. Heinlein
#73. When, after a week, Jubal had had no other message, he sent a stat care of Ben's office: "What
the hell are you doing?" Ben's answer came back, somewhat delayed: "Studying Martian and the rules for
hopscotch -- fraternally yours -- Ben.
Robert A. Heinlein
#74. 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
#75. Remember though, your best weapon is between your ears and under your scalp -provided it's loaded.
Robert A. Heinlein
#76. Never appeal to a man's 'better nature.' He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.
Robert A. Heinlein
#77. Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman's breasts; it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy.
Robert A. Heinlein
#78. When there's nothing else you can do, breathe slower. There's no way it can hurt, and it might help.
Robert A. Heinlein
#80. 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.
Robert A. Heinlein
#81. There was a lot to be said for the job of assistant section leader - when you come right to it, it's a lot easier to die than it is to use your head.
Robert A. Heinlein
#82. But it's a hell of a note when you can't even kill a dragon and feel lighthearted afterwards.
Robert A. Heinlein
#83. Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.
Robert A. Heinlein
#85. 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
#86. They flew her," Matt pointed out. "Sure they did - and my hat's off to them. But it takes heroes to fly a box as primitive as this and I'm not the hero type.
Robert A. Heinlein
#87. 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
#88. Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled.
Robert A. Heinlein
#89. The whole principle (censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.
Robert A. Heinlein
#90. No one ever does anything but what he wants to do - 'enjoys' - within the possibilities open to him. If I change a tire, it's because I enjoy it more than being stranded.
Robert A. Heinlein
#91. - I'm so busy doing what I must do that I don't have time for what I ought to do ... and I never get a chance to do what I want to do!
- Son, that's universal. The way to keep that recipe from killing you is occasionally to do what you want to do anyhow.
Robert A. Heinlein
#92. An invention is something that was "impossible" up to then that's why governments grant patents.
Robert A. Heinlein
#93. A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark.
Robert A. Heinlein
#94. 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.
Robert A. Heinlein
#95. 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
#96. She might say: "This mess will clear up if you take that troublemaker there - What's your name? You, with the goatee - out and shoot him. Do it now."
Glory Road; Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein
#97. Never crowd youngsters about their private affairs - sex especially. When they are growing up, they are nerve ends all over, and resent (quite properly) any invasion of their privacy. Oh, sure, they'll make mistakes - but that's their business, not yours. (You made your own mistakes, did you not?)
Robert A. Heinlein
#98. A zygote is a gamete's way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe.
Robert A. Heinlein
#99. The problem with dictatorships - as I read somewhere recently - and with poisonous ideologies, too, is that they are like sharks. They must keep moving forward or die. What caused their aggression is not what you did. It's who they are.
Robert A. Heinlein
#100. Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary.
Robert A. Heinlein
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