Quotes from Robert A. Heinlein

Everything and anything about a culture can be inferred from the shape of its language—and

I often calculate odds on horse races; the civil service computermen frequently program such requests. But the results are so at variance with expectations that I have concluded either that the data is too meager, or the horses or riders are not honest. Possibly all three.

Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything.

A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking. Commodore Arkwright realized that these tendencies are inherent and inescapable; he hoped to offset them a bit by setting up a course that could not be passed without original thinking.

Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.

I'm not feisty. But when you're as small as I am and female if you don't stand up for your rights, you're sure to be pushed around by big, hairy, smelly men with delusions about male superiority.

Men on the surface of a planet are as helpless against men in spaceships as a man would be trying to conduct a rock-throwing fight from the bottom of a well. The man at the top of the well has gravity working for him.

Being aware that he had but a short time to live and having neither Martian nor Kansan faith in immortality, he purposed to live each golden moment as eternity—without

Basic truths cannot change and once a man of insight expresses one of them it is never necessary, no matter how much the world changes, to reformulate them.

Matt, you are suffering from a disease of youth—you expect moral problems to have nice, neat, black-and-white answers.

If I've reached the place where I'm a good influence on anybody, it's time I cultivated some new vices.

The sort of guardian you can hire is worth about as much as the sort of wife you can buy.

hurry" was not a concept that could be symbolized in the Martian language and therefore must be presumed to be unthinkable. Speed, velocity, simultaneity, acceleration, and other mathematical abstractions having to do with the pattern of eternity were part of Martian mathematics, but not of Martian emotion.

To support his austerely upholstered nest and its rabble staff he put forth minimum effort for maximum return simply because it was easier to be rich than to be poor—Harshaw merely wished to live exactly as he liked, doing whatever he thought was best for him.

BaÅŸkalar?n?n iÅŸine burnunu sokmamak insan?n sahip olabileceÄŸi bilgeliÄŸin yüzde seksenidir... kalan yüzde yirmi de pek önemli deÄŸildir zaten.

He went on to Jubal, " 'Thou art God.' It's not a message of cheer and hope, Jubal. It's a defiance—and an unafraid unabashed assumption of personal responsibility.

I don't know," he had answered grimly, "except that the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves 'social workers' or sometimes 'child psychologists.

Demokrasi en iyi niyetli yakla??mla bile zavall? bir sistemdir; onunla ilgili söylenebilecek tek iyi ÅŸey, insan ?rk?n?n denemiÅŸ olduÄŸu diÄŸer sistemlerden yakla??k sekiz kat daha iyi olmas?d?r. Demokrasinin en büyük kusuru, liderlerinin oy ald?klar? seçmenlerin erdemlerini de kusurlar?n? da ta??malar?d?r; moral bozucu derecede düÅŸük bir düzey ama baÅŸka ne bekleyebilirsin?

The Belt, for all its lonely reaches—or because of them—was as neighborly as a village. They gossiped among themselves, by suit radio. Out in the shining blackness it was good to know that, if something went wrong, there was a man listening not five hundred miles away who would come and investigate if you broke off and did not answer.

But there was winter in my heart and I was looking for the door to summer.

J]uvenile delinquent' is a contradiction in terms. 'Delinquent' means 'failing in duty.' But duty is an adult virtue--indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge and duty and embraces it more than the self-love he was born with.

Yes, yes, I know they make better pilots than men do; their reactions are faster, and they can tolerate more gee. They can get in faster, get out faster, and thereby improve everybody's chances, yours as well as theirs. But that still doesn't make it fun to be slammed against your spine at ten times your proper weight. But

What is 'truth'?" Mike asked. ("What is Truth?" asked a Roman judge, and washed his hands of a troublesome question. Jubal wished that he could do likewise.)

Any man who would take money two ways would take it three ways just as quickly.