Robert A. Heinlein (1907–88,) fully Robert Anson Heinlein, was an American science fiction writer, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. He was among the earliest to feature scientific accuracy in his fiction, and he is considered one of the most literary and sophisticated science-fiction writers.
Born in Butler, Missouri, Heinlein graduated from U.S. Naval Academy in 1929 and serving in the navy for five years. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of California-Los Angeles and then began writing science fiction in 1939. He served in the navy during World War II and resumed writing after the war.
Heinlein called his work “speculative fiction” because he tried to write about events that could happen, considering everything known about the universe’s natural laws. Heinlein wrote more than 50 novels and collections of short stories over four decades. He is best known for his novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961,) a cult classic about a boy born during the first human-crewed mission to Mars. He is raised by Martians, then returns to Earth, starts a church, and preaches free love.
Heinlein’s other popular books include The Green Hills of Earth (1951,) Double Star (1956,) The Door into Summer (1957,) Citizen of the Galaxy (1957,) and Methuselah’s Children (1958.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Robert A. Heinlein
Ninety percent of all human wisdom is the ability to mind your own business.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Wisdom
Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Possibilities, Vision, Authority
No matter where or what, there are makers, takers, and fakers.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: People
The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong. It’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t have steak.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Censorship
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
Age is not an accomplishment, and youth is not a sin.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Youth
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
Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Children
Always listen to the experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Professionalism, Advice, Experts, General
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an “intellectual” – find out how he feels about astrology.
—Robert A. Heinlein
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
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
May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Living
The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: The Universe, Universe
Sin lies in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other sins are invented nonsense.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Integrity
Never make your appeal to a man’s better nature; he may not have one. Always make your appeal to his self-interest.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Nature, Rest, Better
I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Responsibility, Freedom
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Progress
The human race divides itself politically into those who want to be controlled, and those who have no such desire
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Welfare
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
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
Being intelligent is not a felony, but most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Thinking
To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn of falsehoods.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Learning
Moving parts in contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often, the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as empty, meaningless, or dishonest, and scorn to use them. No matter how pure their motives, they thereby throw sand into the machinery that does not work too well at best.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Politeness
A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.
—Robert A. Heinlein
The stars incline, but do not impel.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Gratitude: An imaginary emotion that rewards an imaginary behavior, altruism. Both imaginaries are false faces for selfishness, which is a real and honest emotion.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Gratitude
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Topics: Love, Happiness
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