Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Cats, Fun, Men & Women
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
Topics: Manners
The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.
—Robert A. Heinlein
No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Control, Authority
One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Engineering
If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you’ll abort it if you do. Be patient and you’ll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.
—Robert A. Heinlein
To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn of falsehoods.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Learning
I’ve never understood how God could expect His creatures to pick the one true religion by faith – it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Faith
The stars incline, but do not impel.
—Robert A. Heinlein
The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in it.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: World
The more you love, the more you can love – and the more intensely you love? Nor is there any limit on how many you can love? If a person had time enough, he could love all that majority who are decent and just.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Love
Age is not an accomplishment, and youth is not a sin.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Youth
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. 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.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Oppression
Ninety percent of all human wisdom is the ability to mind your own business.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Wisdom
Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Atheism
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Money
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. Another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible result. 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.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Happiness
Since when was an emotional argument won by logic
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Arguments, One liners
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Self Confidence, Confidence, Jealousy
Sex without love is merely healthy exercise.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Sex
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—in fact, they’re almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other. Both at once can produce unbearable turmoil…
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Jealousy
Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Children
The greatest productive force is human selfishness.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Selfishness, One liners
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an “intellectual” – find out how he feels about astrology.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Always listen to the experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Experts, General, Advice, Professionalism
A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Sin
To be matter of fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy—and dull fantasy at that—as the real world is strange and wonderful.
—Robert A. Heinlein
No matter where or what, there are makers, takers, and fakers.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: People
No storyteller has ever been able to dream up anything as fantastically unlikely as what really does happen in this mad Universe.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: The Universe, Universe
To get anywhere, or even live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Chance
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Ray Bradbury American Science-Fiction Writer
- Robert Anton Wilson American Polymath
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
- Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
- Ursula K. Le Guin Science-fiction writer
- Orson Scott Card American Author
- Andre Norton American Science Fiction Writer
- William Saroyan American Playwright, Novelist
- Philip K. Dick American Writer
- Kurt Vonnegut American Novelist
Leave a Reply