Quotes from Robert A. Heinlein

Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness

When, after a week, Jubal had had no other message, he sent a stat care of Ben's office: What the hell are you doing? Ben's answer came back, somewhat delayed: Studying Martian and the rules for hopscotch -- fraternally yours -- Ben.

There are only five things really worth drawing; four of them are pretty girls and the fifth is cats.

of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to do, every time. If it sometimes pains them to make a choice—if the choice turns out to look like a 'noble sacrifice—

the ways of God and government and girls are all mysterious, and it is not given to mortal man to understand them.

I wanted us to get out of production. Jake Schmidt, our production shop master, was a good man; nevertheless I was forever being jerked out of a warm creative fog to straighten out bugs in production—which is like being dumped out of a warm bed into ice water. This was the real reason why I had been doing so much nightwork and staying away from the shop in the daytime.

In a mature society, "civil servant" is semantically equal to "civil master.

Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

Be raped quietly, you mean.

All men must die, it was their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man.

It is contrary to our customs to permit scientific knowledge to be held as a monopoly for the few. When concealing such knowledge strikes at life itself, the action becomes treason to the race.

But I gathered that it was classified...by order of this Colonel, uh, Plushbottom." "Thrushbotham. Thrushbotham, sir. A fat, fatuous, flatulent, foot-kissing fool incompetent to find his hat with it nailed to his head. Which it should have been.

A paradox may be paradoctored.

To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives—such

But the physical danger was judged to be less important than the psychological stresses. Eight humans, crowded together like monkeys for almost three Terran years, had better get along much better than humans usually did.

Talking with a Martian is something like talking with an echo. You don't get any argument but you don't get results either.

A credit card is a leash around your neck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy…or at best protects her privacy only with great effort and much chicanery. Besides that, do you ever know what the computer network is doing when you poke your card into a slot? I don't. I feel much safer with cash. I've never heard of anyone who had much luck arguing with a computer.

I had the unsettling feeling that I had been completely mistaken as to the very nature of the world I was in, as if every part was something wildly different from what it appeared to be...

Smith used English as one might use a code book, with tedious and imperfect translation for each symbol.

most things are right or wrong only in their backgrounds; few things are good or evil in themselves.

We always trotted everywhere at Camp Arthur Currie. I never did find out who Currie was, but he must have been a trackman.

The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable—from table tapping to the superiority of their children—has never been plumbed.

As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this our culture; it is rooted in our history

Everybody else specializes. Daddy knows everything, and he puts the pieces together.