| Robert A. Heinlein Quotes |
| BorisVM |
Robert A. Heinlein is by far my favorite author. I've read pretty much all of his books several times. Here I will share with you some of the wisdom of his characters. [:)]
The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to a group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand -- that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their 'rights.' The results should have been predictable, since a human has no natural rights of any nature.
Mr. Dubois had paused. Somebody took the bait. Sir? How about 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'?
Mr. Dubois in Starship Troopers |
| BorisVM |
Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws--always for _other_ fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because _not one_ of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to so something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was _always_ something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good --not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.
Manuel Garcia O'Kelly in Moon is a Harsh Mistress |
| BorisVM |
Faith strikes me as a sloppy way to run the universe.
Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land |
| BorisVM |
Peace is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties which do not achieve page-one, lead-story-- unless that civilian is a close relative of one of the casualties. But, if there ever was a time in history when peace meant that there was no fighting going on, I have been unable to find out about it.
Rico in Starship Troopers |
| BorisVM |
Look, friends, the only possible way to enjoy life is not to be afraid to die. A zest for living requires a willingness to die; you cannot have the first without the second. The '60s and '70s and '80s and '90s can be loaded with the zest for living, high excitement, and gutsy adventure for any truly human person. Truly human? I mean you descendants of cavemen who outlasted the saber-tooth, you who sprang from the loins of the Vikings, you whose ancestors fought the Crusades and were numbered the Golden Horde. Death is the lot of all of us and the only way the human race has ever conquered death is by treating it with contempt. By living every golden minute as if one had all eternity.
Guest of Honor Speech at the XIXth World Science Fiction Convention, Seattle, 1961 |
| BorisVM |
We define thinking as integrating data and arriving at correct answers. Look around you. Most people do that stunt just well enough to get to the corner store without breaking a leg. If the average man thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum. He uses one-valued logics. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use two-valued, 'either-or' logic to arrive at his wrong answers. If he is hungry, hurt, or personally interested in the answer, he can't use any sort of logic and will discard an observed fact as blithely as he will stake his life on a piece of wishful thinking. He uses the technical miracles created by superior men without wonder nor surprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of milk. Far from aspiring to higher reasoning, he is not even aware that higher reasoning exist. He classes his own mental process as being of the same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.
For explanations of a universe that confuses him he seizes onto numerology, astrology, hysterical religions, and other fancy ways to go crazy. Having accepted such glorified nonsense, facts make no impression on him, even if at the cost of his own life. Joe, one of the hardest things to believe is the abysmal depth of human stupidity.
Kettle Belly in Gulf |
| BorisVM |
A rational anarchist believes that concepts, such as 'state' and 'society' and 'government' have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame.. as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and _nowhere_ else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world.. aware that his efforts will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failiure.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress |
| BorisVM |
Geniuses are justifiably contemptuous of the opinions of their inferiors.
Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land |
| BorisVM |
Nothing makes a good technical man angrier than to have some incompetent nitwit with a check book telling him how to do his job.
Andy Ferguson in The Man Who Sold the Moon |
| BorisVM |
Rules serve best when broken.
Justin Foote in Time Enough For Love |
| BorisVM |
Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.
L. Long, early in [foreword] '' Ray Guns and Rocket Ships '' (in Expanded Universe) |
| BorisVM |
The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand--that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their 'rights.'
The result of which should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature.
Colonel Dubois in Starship Troopers |
| BorisVM |
Ah, yes, the 'unalienable rights.' Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What 'right' to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What 'right' to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of 'right'? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man's right is 'unalienable'? And is it 'right'?
As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
Colonel Dubois in Starship Troopers |
| BorisVM |
War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing... but controlled and purposeful violence.
But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how - or why - he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people - 'older and wiser heads,' as they say - supply the control. Which is as it should be.
Sgt. Zim in Starship Troopers |
| BorisVM |
The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can prove anything from it.
Dr. Jacob Burroughs in The Number of the Beast |
| BorisVM |
May you live as long as you wish, and love as long as you live.
Minerva in Time Enough for Love |
| BorisVM |
A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers... and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers decide what is 'irresponsible'.
Prof. Bernardo de la Paz in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress |
| BorisVM |
...from the ignoramuses we get for recruits I've reached the conclusion that this new-fangled 'functional educational' has abolished studying in favor of developing their cute little personalities.
Captain Walker in Tunnel in the Sky |
| BorisVM |
...Think about it. Politics is just a name for the way we get things done... without fighting. We dicker and compromise and everybody thinks he has received a raw deal, but somehow after a tedious amount of talk we come up with some jury-rigged way to do it without getting anybody's head bashed in. That's politics. The only other way to settle a dispute is by bashing a few heads in... and that is what happens when one or both sides is no longer willing to dicker. That's why I say politics is good even when it is bad... because the only alternative is force -- and somebody gets hurt.
Uncle Tom in Podkayne of Mars |
| BorisVM |
The hell you say! Well, I won't go that way. When the Old Boy comes to get me, he'll have to drag me -- and I'll be kicking and gouging eyes every step of the way!
Lazarus Long in Methuselah's Children |
| BorisVM |
Don't use that word (fantastic) to a lawyer; straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in law school... In the fifteenth century the Pope deeded the Western Hemisphere to Portugal and Spain, and nobody cared that the real estate was occupied by people with their owns laws, customs, and property rights. His grant was effective, too -- Look at a map and notice where Spanish is spoken an Portuguese is spoken.
Ben Caxton in Stranger in a Strange Land |
| BorisVM |
Human bipolarity was both binding force and driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists have exaggerated this, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for the creations of eunuchs.
Robert A. Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land |
| BorisVM |
Of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to, every time. If it pains them, to make a choice- if the 'choice' looks like a 'sacrifice' -- you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness... the necessity of having to decide between two things you want when you can't have both. The ordinary bloke suffers every time he chooses between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids, between getting up to go to work and losing his job. But he always chooses that which hurts least or pleasures most. The scoundrel and the saint make the same choices....
Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land |
| BorisVM |
A woman who shaves or otherwise depilates her pubic curls has a profound interest in recreational sex.
Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset |
| BorisVM |
The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate.
Ira Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset |
| BorisVM |
I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces--with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way the government sticks its nose into everything, now.
Robert A. Heinlein in The Robert Heinlein Interview And Other Heinleinana by J. Neil Schulman |
| BorisVM |
He wants a mother for his children...but he also wants a willing and available concubine, too. If you are not she, he will find one elsewhere.
Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset |
| BorisVM |
Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing.
One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. And another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible results.
Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.
Jubal Harshaw in To Sail Beyond the Sunset |
| BorisVM |
Some people say-I've heard talk-that married men should not go (to war). Because of their families.
But this involves contradiction, a fatal one. The family man dare not hang back and expect the bachelor to do his fighting for im. It is manifestly unfair for me to expect a bachelor to die for my children if I am unwilling to die for them myself. Enough of that attitude on the part of married men and the bachelor will refuse to fight if the married man stays safe at home...and the republic is doomed. The barbarian will walk in unopposed.
Ira Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset |
| BorisVM |
No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law. He simply follows the eleventh commandment.
Brian Smith in To Sail Beyond the Sunset |
| BorisVM |
Yes, maybe it's just one colossal big joke, with no point to it. But I can tell you this, Andy, whatever the answers are, here's one monkey that's going to keep on climbing, and looking around him to see what he can see, as long as the tree holds out.
Lazarus Long in Methuselah's Children |
| BorisVM |
If a person wants to take his own life, it is (I think) his privilege.
Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset |
| BorisVM |
From politics I have come to believe the following:
(1) Most people are basically honest, kind and decent.
(2) The American people are wise enough to run their own affairs. The do not need Fuehrers, Strong Men, Technocrats, Commissars, Silver Shirts, Theocrats, or any other sort of dictator.
(3) Americans have a compatible community of ambitions. Most of them don't want to be rich but do want enough economic security to permit them to raise families in decent comfort without fear of the future. They want the least government necessary to this purpose and don't greatly mind what the other fellow does as long as it does not interfere with them living their own lives. As a people we are neither money mad nor prying. We are easy-going and anarchistic. We may want to keep up with the Joneses -- but not with the Vanderbilts. We don't like cops.
(4) Democracy is not an automatic condition resulting from laws and constitutions. It is a living, dynamic process which must be worked at by you yourself -- or it ceases to be democracy, even if the shell and form remains.
(5) One way or another, any government which remains in power is a representative government. If your city government is a crooked machine, then it is because you and your neighbors prefer it that way -- prefer it to the effort of running your own affairs. Hitler's government was a popular government; the vast majority of Germans preferred the rule of gangsters to the effort of thinking and doing for themselves. They abdicated their franchise.
(6) Democracy is the most efficient form of government ever invented by the human race. On the record, it has worked better in peace and in war than fascism, communism, or any other form of dictatorship. As for the mythical yardstick of 'benevolent' monarchy or dictatorship -- there ain't no such animal!
(7) A single citizen, with no political connections and no money, can be extremely effective in politics.
Take Back Your Government - A Practical Handbook for the private citizen who wants democracy to work.
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| BorisVM |
Math is hard work and it occupies your mind -- and it doesn't hurt to learn all you can of it, no matter what rank you are; everything of any importance is founded on mathematics.
Juan Rico in Starship Troopers |
| BorisVM |
What this world needs more of is loving: sweaty, friendly and unashamed.
Maureen Johnson-Smith in To Sail Beyond The Sunset |
| BorisVM |
I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. 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.
Professor Bernardo de la Paz in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress |
| BorisVM |
The hell I won't talk that way! Peter, an eternity here without her is not an eternity of bliss; it is an eternity of boredom and loneliness and grief. You think this damned gaudy halo means anything to me when I know--yes, you've convinced me!--that my beloved is burning in the Pit? I didn't ask much. Just to be allowed to live with her. I was willing to wash dishes forever if only I could see her smile, hear her voice, touch her hand! She's been shipped on a technicality and you know it! Snobbish, bad-tempered angels get to live here without ever doing one lick to deserve it. But my Marga, who is a real angel if one ever lived, gets turned down and sent to Hell to everlasting torture on a childish twist in the rules. You can tell the Father and His sweet-talking Son and that sneaky Ghost that they can take their gaudy Holy City and shove it! If Margrethe has to be in Hell, that's where I want to be!
Alexander Hergensheimer in Job: A Comedy of Justice |
| BorisVM |
The shops certainly did have pretty things and the handmade blouses were among the prettiest. Ticky insisted they were bargains and I suppose they were. I never will understand about such things; to my mind a bargain is something I need at a price I can afford.
Robert A. Heinlein in Travels |
| BorisVM |
Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion- in the long run these are the only people who count...
Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love |
| BorisVM |
Still rarer is the man who thinks habitually, who applies reason, rather than habit pattern, to all his activity. Unless he masques himself, his is a dangerous life; he is regarded as queer, untrustworthy, subversive of public morals; he is a pink monkey among brown monkeys -- a fatal mistake. Unless the pink monkey can dye himself brown before he is caught.
The brown monkey's instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.
Rarest of all is the man who can and does reason at all times, quickly, accurately, inclusively, despite hope or fear or bodily distress, without egocentric bias or thalmic disturbance, with correct memory, with clear distinction between fact, assumption, and non-fact.
Kettle Belly Baldwin in Gulf Assignment in Eternity |
| BorisVM |
We defined thinking as integrating data and arriving at correct answers. Look around you. Most people do that stunt just well enough to get to the corner store and back without breaking a leg. If the average man thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum. He uses one-valued logics. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use two-valued, 'either-or' logic to arrive at his wrong anwers. If he is hungry, hurt, or personaly interested in the answer, he can't use any sort of logic and will discard an observed fact as blithely as he will stake his life on a piece of wishful thinking. He
uses the technical miracles created by superior men without wonder nor surprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of milk. Far from aspiring to higher reasoning, he is not even aware that higher reasoning exists. He classes his own mental process as being of the same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.
For explanations of a universe that confuses him, he seizes onto numerology, astrology, hysterical religions, and other fancy ways to go crazy. Having accepted such glorified nonsense, facts make no impression on him, even if at the cost of his own life. Joe, one of the hardest things to believe is the abysmal depth of human stupidity.
Kettle Belly Baldwin in Gulf from Assignment in Eternity |
| BorisVM |
Listen to me. I don't know much about women, and sometimes it seems like I didn't know anything about them. But I'm sure of this - she won't let a little thing like you taking a pot shot at her stand in the way if you ever had any chance with her at all. She'll forgive you.
You don't really mean that, do you? Monroe-Alpha's face was still tragic, but he clutched at the hope.
Certainly I do. Women will forgive anything. With a flash of insight he added, Otherwise the race would have died out long ago.
Hamilton Felix in Beyond This Horizon |
| BorisVM |
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, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.
Robert A. Heinlein in Postscript to Revolt in 2100 |
| BorisVM |
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped ,or turned back, for their private benefit.
The Judge in Life-Line |
| BorisVM |
Whether we make it, or not, the human race has got to keep up it's well earned reputation for ferocity. If the slugs taught us anything, it was that the price of freedom is the wilingness to do sudden battle, anywhere, anytime, and with utter recklessness.
Sam in The Puppet Masters |
| BorisVM |
What did I want?
I wanted a Roc's egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist, and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur - I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.
I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, The game's afoot! I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemÀd always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.
I had had one chance - for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be - and I had known it÷and I had let it slip away.
Maybe one chance is all you ever get.
Oscar Gordon in Glory Road |
| BorisVM |
'Love' is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
jubal harshaw in stranger in a strange land |
| BorisVM |
No matter how lavishly overpaid, civil servants everywhere are convinced they are horribly underpaid-but all public employees have larceny in their hearts or they wouldn't be feeding at the public trough.
Marjorie Friday Baldwin in Friday |
| BorisVM |
An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A GREAT artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is, and force the viewer to se the pretty girl she used to be, more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older that eighteen in her heart.
Jubal in Stranger In A Strange Land |
| BorisVM |
An armed society is a polite society.
Monroe-Alpha in Beyond This Horizon |
| BorisVM |
But in writing your Constitution let me invite attention to the wonderful virtues of the negative! Accentuate the negative! Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do.
Professor Bernardo de la Paz addressing the Luna Constitutional Convention in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress |
| BorisVM |
A desire not to butt into other peoples business is at least 80% of all human wisdom.
Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a strange land |
| BorisVM |
Morality is your agreement with yourself to abide by your own rules.
Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land |
| BorisVM |
At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that news is not something that happens to other people.
Jake in Number of the Beast |
| BorisVM |
No. In sober truth no person can ever be truly responsible for another human being. Each of us faces up to the universe alone, and the universe is what it is and doesn't soften the rules for any of us -- and eventually, in the long run, the universe always wins and takes all. But that doesn't make it any easier when we try to be responsible for another -- as you have, as I have -- and then look back and see how we could have done it better.
Uncle Tom in Podkayne of Mars |
| BorisVM |
One can lead a child to knowledge but one CANNOT make him think.
Mr. (colonel) Dubois in Starship Troopers |
| BorisVM |
The way to live a long time--oh, a thousand years or more--is something between the way a child does it and the way a mature man does it. Give the future enough thought to be ready for it--but don't worry about it. Live each day as if you were to die next sunrise. Then face each sunrise as a fresh creation and live for it, joyously. And never think about the past. No regrets, ever.
Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love |
| BorisVM |
For the first time in my life, I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet's censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy...censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's 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. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked, contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything---you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
John Lyle in If This Goes On-- |
| BorisVM |
I've said this nineteen dozen times but you still don't believe it. Man is the one animal that can't be tamed. He goes along for years, peaceful as a cow, when it suits him. Then when it suits him not to be, he makes a leopard look like a tabby cat. Which goes double for the female of the species.
The Deacon in Tunnel In The Sky |
| n/a |
quote:
Originally posted by BorisVM
Don't use that word (fantastic) to a lawyer; straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in law school... In the fifteenth century the Pope deeded the Western Hemisphere to Portugal and Spain, and nobody cared that the real estate was occupied by people with their owns laws, customs, and property rights. His grant was effective, too -- Look at a map and notice where Spanish is spoken an Portuguese is spoken.
Jubal Harnshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land
(quote is by Jubal not Ben Caxton as previosly noted) |
| n/a |
Thorby had no other talents so he became an actor.
Narator in Citizen of the Galazy |
| n/a |
"Gracious, darling, I wish you had never taken up a calling so... well, so dangerous."
Hellen shrugged. "The death rate is the same for us as for anybody...one person,one death, sooner or later..."
Hellen Walker to Mrs. Walker in Tunnel in the Sky |
| dejan |
To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.
Hamlet |
| sasha |
"A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invarably a symptom of neurotic insecurity."...-Robert A. Heinlein.... |
| SpaceLily |
"A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. "
"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. "
"The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive. "
Robert Heinlein
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