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JSONHeinlein
Quotes by the grand master, Robert A. Heinlein
Quote | Author | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than a riot. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it--it keeps him upright. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Almighty Ruler of the all, Whose Power extends to great and small, Who guides the stars with steadfast law, Whose least creation fills with awe, O grant thy mercy and thy grace, To those who venture into space. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| An armed society is a polite society. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Being right too soon is socially unacceptable. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| But an invention is something that was 'impossible' up to then--that's why governments grant patents. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't bet, you can't win. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| 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. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Does history record any case in which the majority was right? | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad--but not before. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Fifty-odd years ago [circa 1930] astrology was commonly regarded as a ridiculous former superstition, one all but a tiny minority had outgrown. It is now the orthodoxy of many, possibly a majority. This pathological change parallels the decay of public education. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| How you behave towards cats here below determines your status in Heaven. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| I suspect that our race's tragedy has been played endless times. It may be that an intelligent race has to expand right up to its disaster point to achieve what is needed to break out of its planet and reach for the stars. It may always--or almost always--be a photo finish, with the outcome uncertain to the last moment. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| If all of us tried to go back-to-nature, most of us would starve rather quickly. These back-to-nature freaks can't do arithmetic. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| If Columbus had waited for decent ships we'd all still be in Europe. A man has to take some chances or he'll never get anywhere. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| If the horse can't jump the hurdle, shoot the horse. Keep on doing this and eventually you will find a horse that can clear the jump--if you don't run out of horses. This is the sort of plausible pseudologic that most people bring to political affairs. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course! | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Imperialism degrades both oppressor and oppressed. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| In fact, the real engineering problems of space travel have been solved since World War II. Conquering space has long been a matter of money and politics. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| 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. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Luck is a bonus that follows careful planning--it's never free. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| My first grade class had 63 kids in it, one teacher, no assistant. Before the end of the second semester all 63 could read. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| NASA has two remarkable records: first, a space program far more successful than anyone had dared hope; and, second, the most incredibly bumbling, stupid, inept public relations of any government agency. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| 'One World' means a concept in which the United States is not sovereign, any more than one of our states is truly sovereign. That means that the United States would be outvoted... which just as certainly means that they would swarm over us immediately after counting the votes. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Our national loss of nerve, our escalating anti-intellectualism, our almost total disinterest in anything that does not directly and immediately profit us, the shambles of public education throughout most of our nation... cause me to predict that our space program will continue to dwindle. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Psychologists once locked an ape in a room, for which they had arranged only four ways of escaping. Then they spied on him to see which of the four he would find. The ape escaped a fifth way. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| 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 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 motive. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| That's the beauty of this business. You don't have to know anything; you just have to know where to find out. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| The answer to any question starting, 'Why don't they--' is almost always, 'Money.' | 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 | |||
| The hardest part of gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| The licensing of weapons is subversive of liberty and self-defeating in its pious purpose. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment: good, but not good enough to win. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| There are a lot of good, kindly people who are internationalists these days. Nine out of ten of them are soft in the head and the tenth is ignorant | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| There is nothing so permanent in this world as a temporary emergency. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| There may be no candidates and measures you want to vote for... But there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Tilting at windmills hurts you more than the windmills. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| We are not liked, we have few friends; therefore we should quit being afraid, stand up and assert ourselves. The only friends we will lose thereby are those we never had. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| We can't make the world safe for children, nor for men either--and God didn't appoint us to do it. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| We did not want it that way--but if somebody has to be boss, I want it to be us. Disarm them and don't turn them loose. We can treat the individual persons decently in an economic sense, but take away their sovereignty. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| We remain strong in science and engineering but even students in those subject are handicapped by failure of our primary and secondary schools and by cutback in funding of research both public and private. Our great decline in education is alone enough to destroy this country. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| What are the facts? Again and again and again--what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what 'the stars foretell'--what are the facts and to how many decimal places? | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| What would you say to high pay, steady work, unlimited expense account, your own boss on the job, and lots of variety and adventure? I'd say, 'Get those goddamn reindeer off my roof!' Shove it, Pop--there's no such job. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| When I went to school, they taught me to honor the Flag, vote the straight party ticket, and believe in the law of conservation of energy. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| While the rest of the human race are descended from monkeys, redheads derive from cats. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| ...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 | |||
| Once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| ‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| What I fear most are... actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Our race will spread out through space--unlimited room, unlimited energy, unlimited wealth. This is certain. But I am not certain that the working language will be English. The people of the United States seem to have lost their nerve. | Robert A. Heinlein, Congressional testimony, 19 July 1979 | |||
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