Quotes from Robert A. Heinlein

Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.

When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

Do this. Don't do that. Stay back in line. Where's tax receipt? Fill out form. Let's see license. Submit six copies. Exit only. No left turn. No right turn. Queue up and pay fine. Take back and get stamped. Drop dead— but first get permit.

Never own more than you can carry in both hands at a dead run.

Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.

Take big bites. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

I don't see why human people make such a heavy trip out of sex. It isn't anything complex, it is simply the best thing in life, even better than food.

Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.

Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself.

Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

Never tease an old dog; he might have one bite left.

My old man says when it's time to be counted, the important thing is to be man enough to stand up.

Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don't walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don't know how to describe it, but it's much more complex and utterly delightful. They don't move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions . . . and all of it graceful.

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.

Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. [He is also a fool.]

Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.

Women are amazing creatures-sweet, soft, gentle, and far more savage than we are.

English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it.

Work is not an end in itself; there must always be time enough for love.

An armed society is a polite society.

Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds.

Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.

There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?