Quotes from Robert A. Heinlein

Gratitude' is a euphemism for resentment. Resentment from most people I do not mind—but from pretty little girls it is distasteful to me.

The second point I want to make is that you are right; the boy does indeed have to learn human customs. He must be taught to take off his shoes in a mosque and to wear his hat in a synagogue and to cover his nakedness when taboo requires it, or our tribal shamans will burn him for deviationism. But, child, by the myriad deceptive aspects of Ahriman, don't brainwash him in the process. Make sure he is cynical about each part of it.

If I choose to dine with publicans and sinners, that is my business. But I do not choose to break bread with Pharisees.

Your business, son." "Yes. Self. I must grok each cusp myself alone. And so must you . . . and so must each self. Thou art God." "I don't accept the nomination." "You can't refuse it. Thou art God and I am God and all that groks is God, and I am all that I have ever been or seen or felt or experienced. I am all that I grok.

It is not nonsense and nobody asked you; you aren't competent to have an opinion about it.

I wouldn't want Larry to die through my oversight. Larry is entitled to work out his own damn foolishness without having it cut short through my carelessness. Duke, I believe in everyone's working out his own damnation his own way . . . but nevertheless that is no excuse for an adult to give a dynamite cap to a baby as a toy.

I've never been able to understand 'faith' myself, nor to see how a just God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion out of an infinitude of false ones—by faith alone. It strikes me as a sloppy way to run an organization, whether a universe or a smaller one.

A magician is a rule-of-thumb engineer.

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

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!

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.

But their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was to die and let younger minds, still limber, take over.

There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true.

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 in to him with a stick.

Remind me, Jubal said to her, to write a popular article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to tthe unecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the toubles and sins of five billion strangers. The title is 'Gossip Unlimited' - no, make that 'Gossip Gone Wild.'

Here's to alcoholic brotherhood . . . much more suited to the frail human soul, if any, than any other sort.

Library science was the foundation of all sciences.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards

Jubal waved the man back. "Private," he said firmly. "Family matter. Go have a drink." "Whose family?" "A death in yours, if you insist. Scat!

See here, son, if a deputy sheriff beats a prisoner to death, it's sweepstakes odds that the county commissioners didn't order it, didn't know it, and wouldn't have permitted it had they known. At worst they shut their eyes to it—afterwards—rather than upset their own applecarts. But assassination has never been an accepted policy in this country.

Men are always for hire who like dirty work.

Being "up to something" was the unnamable and unforgiveable crime for which any American male could be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced in one breath. He wondered how things had gotten rigged so that the male half of the race must always behave to suit feminine rules and feminine logic, like a snotty-nosed school boy in front of a stern teacher.

Nope. Gadflies such as yourself are utterly necessary. Nor am I opposed to 'turning the rascals out'—it's usually the soundest rule of politics. But it's well to take a look at what new rascals you are going to get before you jump at any chance to turn your present rascals out.

Youse guys think this deleted outfit is a blankety-blank nursery. Well, it ain't! See? —Remark attributed to a Hellenic corporal before the walls of Troy, 1194 B.C.