Quotes About Heinlein

the strategic situation foreseen by Robert Heinlein in the death dust story was like "a duel in a vestibule with flamethrowers," anticipating mutual assured destruction and its acronym quite nicely. Tolstoy famously

All people who grew up with science fiction and fantasy and horror went through the whole acculturation process of the genre. We were all told to read the golden age writers. We were all told Heinlein and Asimov and all these straight, white males, although some of them were Jewish.

As a fellow science fiction author, Heinlein largely raised me, and I resent it when some folks lazily dismiss Heinlein as a 'right winger' or even 'fascist.'

Neither they nor Warren Rochelle (' Dual Attractions', 1999) nor Chris West (' Queer Fears and Critical Orthodoxies', 2002) (who focuses on homosexuality) ground their critiques in the periods in which Heinlein was writing, the editors he was writing for, or the librarians who could decide whether books did or did not make it onto the shelves in a period in which libraries were only just starting to retreat from the position of major purchasers.

Increasingly–and mirroring what was happening in American politics–Heinlein would attract single-issue or single-novel admirers. Starship Troopers was just the first inkling of this.

Oddly, Leon Stover, in Robert A. Heinlein, one of the best close readers in other ways, comes away with the idea that Heinlein 'defends the traditional ethics of Christian civilisation' (p. 61) which is a hard argument to make given the amount of out-of-wedlock sex in his work and the satirisation of so much Christian practice in Stranger in a Strange Land and Job.

It is not clear when cats became a 'thing' in science fiction but Heinlein made a significant contribution to their presence and to the construction of that presence.

Truthfully, the person with whom I identified most in Heinlein's early works was Rhysling in 'The Green Hills of Earth.'

It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.

Money is the sincerest of all flattery. Women love to be flattered. So do men.

I stepped through the doors of the SA Café with a borrowed copy of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot in my hand, expecting to find more of the same, only to find Philip K. Dick sitting at a table, obsessing over Gnostic demiurges and ersatz realities, Robert A. Heinlein across from him, spouting libertarian aphorisms but paying for Dick's coffee.

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.

I did always think of Heinlein as a strict rationalist, although a dispassionate examination of his works doesn't support that.

I scrolled on down to the obituaries. I usually read the obituaries first as there is always the happy chance that one of them will make my day.

Mr. Vanadium, your quarter trick is really cool. But here's something out of Heinlein.

Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views - on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics - than Robert Heinlein.

The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom. That's a personal evaluation, of course.

a classic example of Robert Heinlein's famous saying, that an armed society is a polite society.