Quotes from Robert Heinlein

Love is a that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own...Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy

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.

Yield to temptation...it may not pass your way again!

Men rarely if ever dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.

What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

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.

The first principle of freedom is the right to go to hell in your own handbasket.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as bad luck.

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

Dad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just as math is the key -- and we will survive or founder, depending on how well the librarians do their jobs. Librarians didn't look glamorous to me but maybe Dad had hit on a not very obvious truth.

One man's "magic" is another man's engineering. "Supernatural" is a null word.

ANYTHING will burn with enough gasoline and dynamite.

Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.

when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.

Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain... 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

If a thing's worth doing, it's worth overdoing. (Lazarus Long)

A community where everyone is a ruthless murderer, with handy access to death-dealing devices, is a very polite community.

It's better to copulate than not.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured...the only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked to him with a stick. If you disturb the patient at such time, he may break into tears or become violent.