Top 682 Quotes & Sayings by Robert A. Heinlein - Page 9

Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness.

More people worry themselves to death than bleed to death.

If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course!

Revolution is an art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve. Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying as a victory.

Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it - especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.

Straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in law schools.

My vocal cords lived their own life, wild and free.

Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse.

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

If I don’t start having service I’m going to swap you all for a dog and shoot the dog.

Once you get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system.

Humans hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn - when they do, which isn't often - on their own, the hard way.

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them.

A human being has no natural rights of any nature.

But I contend that the disgusting behavior of many of their alleged 'holy men' relieves us of any intellectual obligation to take the stuff seriously. No amount of sanctimonious rationalization can make such behavior anything but pathological.

Thou art god, I am god. All that groks is god.

Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius.

I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes, will endure --will endure longer than his home planet, will spread out to the other planets, to the stars, and beyond, carrying with him his honesty, his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage --and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart.

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.

By the data to date, there is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man -- man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no enemy to help him.

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.

One should not attend even the end of the world without a good breakfast.

A family reunion is an effective form of birth control.

The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with those three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.

Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your effective lifetime - and thereby gives time to enjoy butterflies and kittens and rainbows.

Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent.

Physicians had gone to their graves calling Pasteur a liar, a fool, or worse—without examining evidence which their “common sense” told them was impossible.

Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person.

Spacemen - men who work in space, pilots and jetmen and astrogators and such - are men who like a few million miles of elbow room.

Nor would anybody suspect. If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor.

Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil. Limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too.

Have you ever noticed how much they look like orchids? lovely!

You were probably educated in the conventional economic theories of your period which were magnificent and most ingenious, but--if you will pardon my saying so--all wrong.

Pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival.

I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much . . . because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting.

In Wilson's scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality.

History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational basis.

A girl's name ending in 'a' - that always suggests a 'C' cup.

The future is better than the past. Despite the crepe hangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands ... with tools ... with horse sense and science and engineering.

All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.

When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.

On the steps of the Federal Building we ran into Carmencita Ibanez, a classmate of ours and one of the nice things about being a member of a race with two sexes.

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.

Yes, Boss?' Dorcas, the last twenty or thirty years I've been a worthless, no-good parasite.' She yawned again. 'Everybody knows that.' Nevermind the flattery. There comes a time in every man's life when he has to stop being sensible--a time to stand up and be counted--strike a blow for liberty--smite the wicked.' Ummm...' So quit yawning, the time has come.' She glanced down. 'Maybe I had better get dressed.

Was there ever a time when the majority was right?

If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people. -- Lazarus Long.

But, do you know, once you get used to it's rather cute. I mean, if a girl looks alright to start with, she still looks alright with her head smooth.

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.

Beauty is not diminished by being shared.

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

Jill: 'I don't pay attention to politics.' Ben: 'You should. It's barely less important than your own heart beat.' Jill: 'I don't pay attention to that, either.'

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

Never try to have the last word. You might get it.

Hate always sells well, but for repeat trade and the long pull happiness is sounder merchandise.

Since survival is the sine qua non, I now define the "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival".

The more you love, the more you can love - and the more intensely you love.

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

Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For a first offense, that is.

Talking with a Martian is like talking with an echo. You don't get argument but you don't get results.