Quotes from Robert A. Heinlein

Time was when I was immune to emotional shocks. But as I get older, I don't get tougher; I get softer.

certain feet were made for stepping on ,in order to improve the breed, promote the general welfare and minimize the ancient insolence of office..

To die trying is the proudest humans thing.

Customs, morals—is there a difference? Woman, do you realize what you are doing? Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe—and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes—make him feel shame if he doesn't have it.

The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever . . . I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?

I hate to tell you this, but you are just stupid and eager and sincere enough to make the kind of officer that men love to follow into some silly predicament.

Some people are ants by nature; they have to work, even when it's useless. Few people have a talent for constructive laziness.

Each sunrise is a precious jewel . . . for it may never be followed by its sunset.

Getting a problem analyzed is two-thirds of solving it.

I am not a pacifist. Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay—and claims a halo for his dishonesty.

Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art. But it's up to the artist to use language that can be understood. Most of these jokers don't want to use language you and I can learn; they would rather sneer because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If anything. Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence.

Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.

We organized First and Second Volunteer Defense Gunners of Free Luna-two regiments so that First could snub lowly Second and Second could be jealous of First.

The more you love, the more you can love—and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just. Masturbation is cheap, clean, convenient, and free of any possibility of wrongdoing—and you don't have to go home in the cold. But it's lonely.

It comes from exercising care in the choice of parents.

Call it that if you like. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.

One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.

Forgiveness and thanks go hand in hand.

I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers... It is an invitation to think -- not to believe.

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.

They insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own, and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing, is one that they can't or won't entertain.

Value' has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—'market value' is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average personal values, all of which must be quantitively different or trade would be impossible.

There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.

I'm a professional bad example. You can learn a lot by watching me. Or listening to me. Either one.