Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

Men are not potatoes!

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.

What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.

Never frighten a little man. He'll kill you.

An armed society is a polite society.

If men were the automatons that behaviorists claim they are, the behaviorist psychologists could not have invented the amazing nonsense called 'behaviorist psychology.'

Men rarely if ever dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

I'll give you an exact definition. When the happiness of another person becomes as essential to yourself as your own, then the state of love exists.

Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.

Nobody has ever seen an electron. Nor a thought. You can't see a thought, you can't measure, weigh, nor taste it- but thoughts are the most real things in the Galaxy.

Remember this: once the human race is established on more than one planet and especially, in more than one solar system, there is no way now imaginable to kill off the human race.

...revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science for the few who are competent to practice it. It depends on correct organisation and above all, on communications.

You can go wrong by being too skeptical as readily as by being too trusting.

Whoring is like military service...okay in the upper brackets, not so good lower down.

There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships or missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time. We've never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will.

It may take endless wars and unbearable population pressure to force-feed a technology to the point where it can cope with space. In the universe, space travel may be the normal birth pangs of an otherwise dying race. A test. Some races pass, some fail.

A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark.

Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part...and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.

A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" - find out how he feels about astrology.

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.

It's better to copulate than not.

A woman is not property, and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dreamworld.

There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?

Whenever women have insisted on absolute equality with men, they have invariably wound up with the dirty end of the stick. What they are and what they can do makes them superior to men, and their proper tactic is to demand special privileges, all the traffic will bear. They should never settle merely for equality. For women, "equality" is a disaster.

Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds.

He's as weird as snake's suspenders but sweet as a stolen kiss, too.

Some logics get nervous breakdowns. Overloaded phone system behaves like frightened child. Mike did not have upsets, acquired sense of humor instead. Low one. If he were a man, you wouldn't dare stoop over. His idea of thigh-slapper would be to dump you out of bed — or put itch powder in pressure suit.

I don't see why human people make such a heavy trip out of sex. It isn't anything complex, it is simply the best thing in life, even better than food.

Premenstrual Syndrome: Just before their periods women behave the way men do all the time.

You do not truly own anything that you can't carry in both arms at a dead run

People simplify 'Apollonian' into 'mild', and 'calm', and 'cool'. But 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin--a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox.

To assess the intelligence of a committee, divide the IQ of its stupidest member by the number of members.

Formal courtesy between husband and wife is even more important than it is between strangers.

Around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned.

The Universe was a silly place at best...but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.

The marks won't listen if it's free.

An armed man need not fight.

Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?

Whether the authorities be invaders or merely local tyrants, the effect of such [gun control] laws is to place the individual at the mercy of the state, unable to resist.

Another ingredient in a happy marriage: Budget the luxuries first!

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw

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

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.

I came, I saw, she conquered." The original Latin seems to have been garbled.

Every Congressman, every Senator knows precisely what causes inflation... but can't, [won't] support the drastic reforms to stop it [repeal of the Federal Reserve Act] because it could cost him his job.

Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.

Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.