Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

But, do you know, once you get used to it's rather cute. I mean, if a girl looks alright to start with, she still looks alright with her head smooth.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

His was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

For millennia philosophers and saints have tried to reason out a logical scheme for the universe... until Hilda came along and demonstrated that the universe is not logical but whimsical, its structure depending solely on the dreams and nightmares of non-logical dreamers.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Love is a that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own...Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy

~ Robert A. Heinlein

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

There were many, many times thereafter that Don regretted having enlisted - but so has every man who ever volunteered for military service.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Civilians are like beans, you buy 'em as needed for any job which merely requires skill and savvy.But you can't buy fighting spirit.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

He was delighted to recognize his own human name on two of the papers; he always got an odd thrill out of reading it, as if he were two places at once.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

- I'm so busy doing what I must do that I don't have time for what I ought to do... and I never get a chance to do what I want to do!- Son, that's universal. The way to keep that recipe from killing you is occasionally to do what you want to do anyhow.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

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

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Richard, Bill has the socialist disease in its worst form; he thinks the world owes him a living. He told me sincerely - smugly! - that of course everyone was entitled to the best possible medical and hospital service - free of course, unlimited of course, and of course the government should pay for it.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Butterflies are not insects,' Captain John Sterling said soberly. 'They are self-propelled flowers.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Take sides! Always take sides! You will sometimes be wrong - but the man who refuses to take sides must always be wrong.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

. . .and he has nevergiven up his conviction that if you just try all the doors one of them is bound to be the Door intoSummer. You know, I think he is right.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

You are telling me that I did something because I was going to do something.”“Well, didn’t you? You were there.”“No, I didn’t—no… well, maybe I did, but it didn’t feel like it.”“Why should you expect it to? It was something totally new to your experience.”“But… but—” Wilson took a deep breath and got control of himself. Then he reached back into his academic philosophical concepts and produced the notion he had been struggling to express. “It denies all reasonable theories of causation. You would have me believe that causation can be completely circular. I went through because I came back from going through to persuade myself to go through. That’s silly.”“Well, didn’t you?

~ Robert A. Heinlein

As for logic and internal consistency, these mundane rules do not apply to sacred writings and never have...

~ Robert A. Heinlein

The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

To die trying is the proudest humans thing.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman's breasts, it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

He's an honest politician--he stays bought.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

If you got good elective officials in your day, it was a happy accident, better than you deserved.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

He was finding it ruinously expensive to be rich.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

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.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

I never learned from a man who agreed with me.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

They didn't want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

~ Robert A. Heinlein