A Quote by Robert A. Heinlein

One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering. 'Supernatural' is a null word.

Robert A. Heinlein

Quote Topics

Another Another Man Engineering Magic Man Null One Man Supernatural Word

Quote Author

Robert A. Heinlein
American - Writer
July 7, 1907 - May 8, 1988

Christianity claims that the supernatural is as reasonable as the natural, that man himself is supernatural as truly as he is natural, and that the Bible is so clearly the word of God by proofs that are unanswerable, that it is unreasonable to disbelieve its divine truths.

Abbott Eliot Kittredge

Alongside the statement about one man's poison being another man's high, one might as well add that one man's saint can be another man's sore and one man's hero can turn out to be that man's biggest hangup.

Ken Kesey

Man's word is his wand filled with magic and power! Man comes into the world financed by God, with all that he desires or requires already on his pathway. This supply is released through faith and the Spoken Word. If thou canst believe, all things are possible.

Florence Scovel Shinn

We have a duty to encourage one another. Many a time a word of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer has kept a man on his feet. Blessed is the man who speaks such a word.

William Barclay

One man's magic is another man's gluey torture session.

Jackie Earle Haley

If we apply the term revolution to what happened in North America between 1776 and 1829, it has a special meaning. Normally, the word describes the process by which man transforms himself from one kind of man, living in one kind of society, with one way of looking at the world, into another kind of man, another society, another conception of life.... The American case is different: it is not a question of the Old Man transforming himself into the New, but of the New Man becoming alive to the fact that he is new, that he has been transformed already without his having realized it.

W. H. Auden

Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural; whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom.

J. R. R. Tolkien

I continue to say that I wish we had another word other than magic. It no longer means what we are doing or we are attempting to do. We have to find another terminology. Magic is first and foremost a way of belief.

Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki

Profits are the lifeblood of the economic system, the magic elixir upon which progress and all good things depend ultimately. But one man's lifeblood is another man's cancer.

Paul Samuelson

Long ago, there was a noble word, liberal, which derives from the word free. Now a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word. ... We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.

Eleanor Roosevelt

[Coining phrase "null hypothesis"] In relation to any experiment we may speak of this hypothesis as the "null hypothesis," and it should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.

Ronald Fisher

I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.

Frantz Fanon

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

Octavio Paz

How can another man call another man boss? That's like calling another man 'Daddy.'

Damon Dash

You think that it’s not magic that keeps you alive? Just ‘cause you understand the mechanics of how something works, doesn’t make it any less of a miracle. Which is just another word for magic. We’re all kept alive by magic, Sookie. My magic’s just a little different from yours, that’s all.