Quotes by Robert A. Heinlein

The country and culture commonly known as America had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees---its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.

But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing, I became too stink in’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees.

The Mother Thing makes our world.

More depended on the student than on the school.

When you read about chemistry and physics, you want to do them too.

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. [He is also a fool.]

I had never been much interested in Pluto, too many facts and too much isolation.

Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Dont ever count on having both at once.

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.

If we can use an H-bomb--and as you said its no checker game; its real, its war and nobody is fooling around--isnt it sort of ridiculous to go crawling around in the weeds, throwing knives and maybe getting yourself killed . . . and even losing the war . . . when youve got a real weapon you can use to win? Whats the point in a whole lot of men risking their lives with obsolete weapons when one professor type can do so much more just by pushing a button?Zim didnt answer at once, which wasnt like him at all. Then he said softly, Are you happy in the Infantry, Hendrick? You can resign, you know.Hendrick muttered something; Zim said, Speak up!Im not itching to resign, sir. Im going to sweat out my term.I see. Well, the question you asked is one that a sergeant isnt really qualified to answer . . . and one that you shouldnt ask me. Youre supposed to know the answer before you join up. Or you should. Did your school have a course in History and Moral Philosophy?What? Sure--yes, sir.Then youve heard the answer. But Ill give you my own--unofficial--views on it. If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cuts its head off?Why . . . no, sir!Of course not. Youd paddle it. There can be circumstances when its just as foolish to hit an enemy with an H-Bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an ax. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your governments decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence. But its not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. Its never a soldiers business to decide when or where or how--or why--he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people--older and wiser heads, as they say--supply the control. Which is as it should be. Thats the best answer I can give you. If it doesnt satisfy you, Ill get you a chit to go talk to the regimental commander. If he cant convince you--then go home and be a civilian! Because in that case you will certainly never make a soldier.

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didnt care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with lessons from history is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.

There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and 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 are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. Were the bloody infantry, the doughboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person. Weve been doing it, with changes in weapons but very little change in our trade, at least since the time five thousand years ago when the foot sloggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry Uncle!Maybe theyll be able to do without us someday. Maybe some mad enius with myopia, a bulging forehead, and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition, adn force it to surrender or die--without killing that gang of your own people theyve got imprisoned down there. I wouldnt know; Im not a genius, Im an M.I. In the meantime, until they build a machine to replace us, my mates can handle that job--and I might be some help on it, too.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

Secrecy begets tyranny.

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other 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 their freedoms

For the first time in my life, I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophets censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that 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 motives. 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 cant conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

Freedom is a hard habit to break.

Sex, whatever else it is, is an athletic skill. The more you practice, the more you can, the more you want to, the more you enjoy it, the less it tires you.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.