Quotes from Robert A. Heinlein

With just a touch more self confidence and a liberal helping of ignorance I could have been a famous evangelist.

I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts... because its the only thing that'll make it stop hurting. But find me something that makes you laugh, a joke, anything--but something that gave you a belly laugh, not a smile. Then we'll see if there isn't wrongness somewhere and whether you would laugh if the wrongness wasn't there.

In Wilson's scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality. ~ By His Bootstraps / Robert A. Heinlein

Children seldom are able to realize that death will come to them personally. One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die ... and accepts his sentence undismayed.

Women and cats do as they damned well please, and men and dogs had best learn to live with it.

We learned not to waste ammo even on warriors except in self-protection

Many problems can be solved by a man not frightened by them.

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.

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant nothing would. No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

Now let me get something straight: you are not in my debt. You can't be. Impossible - because I never do anything I don't want to do. Nor does anyone, but in my case I am always aware of it. So please don't invent a debt that does not exist, or before you know it you will be trying to feel gratitude - and that is the treacherous first step downward to complete moral degradation.

My point is that one person is responsible, Always. If H-bombs exist--and they do--some man controls them. In terms of morals there is no such thing as 'state'. Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.

He was finding it ruinously expensive to be rich.

This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted . . . and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.

Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly . . .

Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity or terror, which is not abstract at all but very human.

If I don't start having service I'm going to swap you all for a dog and shoot the dog.

As for logic and internal consistency, these mundane rules do not apply to sacred writings and never have...

That was smart, that was engineering: never reinvent something that you can buy down the street.

one of the few things I've learned is that humans hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn—when they do, which isn't often—on their own, the hard way.

I was no fool; I was aware that when another man is too anxious to force money on one, it is time to examine the cards, for there is almost certainly something illegal, or dangerous, or both, involved in the matter.

Sovereign, like love, means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between sober and sozzled.

Marriage is a young man's disaster and an old man's comfort.

When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.