Quotes from Robert A. Heinlein

A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it—it keeps him upright.

The whole principle (censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

She taught me to love by loving me, and I learned—rather slowly; I wasn't too good a pupil, being set in my ways and lacking her natural talent. But I did learn. Learned that supreme happiness lies in wanting to keep another person safe and warm and happy, and being privileged to try.

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.

English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing.

You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated. After he pees in it himself, he likes the flavor much better, so he buys it.

I refuse to grow younger. I came by my decrepitude the hard way and I propose to enjoy it.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

the word 'love' designates a subjective condition in which the welfare and happiness of another person are essential to one's own happiness.

The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of 'rights' . . . and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.

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.

If Satan should ever replace God he would find it necessary to assume the attributes of Divinity.

Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.

Many older physicians had gone to their graves calling Pasteur a liar, a fool, or worse---and without examining evidence which their "common sense" told them was impossible.

There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat.

People who are busy and happy don't write diaries; they are too busy living.

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw

The best things in history are accomplished by people who get tired of being shoved around.

I pity the poverty of your wealth.

Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more. All the wealthy, unhappy people you're ever met take sleeping pills; Mobile Infantrymen don't need them. Give a cap trooper a bunk and time to sack out in it and he's as happy as a worm in an apple - asleep.

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.

Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman's breasts; it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy.

Morals — all correct moral laws — derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

Civilians are like beans; you buy 'em as needed for any job which merely requires skill and savvy. But you can't buy fighting spirit.