Quotes by Robert A. Heinlein

There were many, many times thereafter that Don regretted having enlisted - but so has every man who ever volunteered for military service.

He was delighted to recognize his own human name on two of the papers; he always got an odd thrill out of reading it, as if he were two places at once.

- Im so busy doing what I must do that I dont have time for what I ought to do... and I never get a chance to do what I want to do!- Son, thats universal. The way to keep that recipe from killing you is occasionally to do what you want to do anyhow.

A hero must hero.

There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.

My old man says when its time to be counted, the important thing is to be man enough to stand up.

Richard, Bill has the socialist disease in its worst form; he thinks the world owes him a living. He told me sincerely - smugly! - that of course everyone was entitled to the best possible medical and hospital service - free of course, unlimited of course, and of course the government should pay for it.

Butterflies are not insects, Captain John Sterling said soberly. They are self-propelled flowers.

Take sides! Always take sides! You will sometimes be wrong - but the man who refuses to take sides must always be wrong.

. . .and he has nevergiven up his conviction that if you just try all the doors one of them is bound to be the Door intoSummer. You know, I think he is right.

You are telling me that I did something because I was going to do something.”“Well, didn’t you? You were there.”“No, I didn’t—no… well, maybe I did, but it didn’t feel like it.”“Why should you expect it to? It was something totally new to your experience.”“But… but—” Wilson took a deep breath and got control of himself. Then he reached back into his academic philosophical concepts and produced the notion he had been struggling to express. “It denies all reasonable theories of causation. You would have me believe that causation can be completely circular. I went through because I came back from going through to persuade myself to go through. That’s silly.”“Well, didn’t you?

As for logic and internal consistency, these mundane rules do not apply to sacred writings and never have...

The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.

To die trying is the proudest humans thing.

My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.

Hes an honest politician--he stays bought.

If you got good elective officials in your day, it was a happy accident, better than you deserved.

He was finding it ruinously expensive to be rich.

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... 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.

When a place gets crowded enough to require IDs, 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.