Quotes by Robert A. Heinlein

Yes, sir, there are things to see and do on the French Riviera without spending money.

Its a long story. Want a refill?No, lets start the steak. Wheres the button?Right here.Well, push it.Me? You offered to cook.Ben Caxton, I will lie here and starve before I will get up to push a button six inches from your fingerAs you wish. He pressed the button. But dont forget who cooked dinner.

I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth--then shut up.

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

To permit irresponsible authority is to sell disaster.

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

He had learned that close-held secrets could often be cracked by going all the way to the top and there making himself unbearably unpleasant. He knew that such twisting of the tigers tail was dangerous, for he understood the psychopathology of great power.

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.

Every citizen is free to perform any act which does not hamper the equal freedom of another. No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of any other person.

I was there to see beautiful naked women. So was everybody else. Its a common failing.

Butterflies are self propelled flowers.

A thing can be fine on paper but utterly crummy in the field.

Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.

Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times

Library science was the foundation of all sciences.

One might almost define intelligence as the level at which an aware organism demands, Whats in it for me?

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.

A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.