Quotes by Robert A. Heinlein

If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.

The less respect an older person deserves the more certain he is to demand it from anyone younger.

. . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we fail to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason - but one cannot have both.

Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.

In the twentieth century, nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America---and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it.

there used to be, dirtside, a legal defenses called diminished capacity and not guilty by reason on insanity. These concepts would bewilder a Loonie. In Luna City a man would necessarily be of diminished mental capacity to even think about rape; to carry one out would be the strongest possible proof of insanity - but among Loonies such mental disorders would not gain a rapist any sympathy. loonies do not psychoanalyze a rapist; they kill him. Now. Fast. Brutally.

How is a sincere criminal, trying hard, going to get ahead in his profession if his victim fails to cooperate?

When you vote, you are exercising political authority, youre using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive.

Many problems can be solved by a man not frightened by them.

Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.

I’ve been kissed by men who did a very good job. But they don’t give kissing their whole attention. They can’t. No matter how hard they try parts of their minds are on something else. Missing the last bus—or their chances of making the gal—or their own techniques in kissing—or maybe worry about jobs, or money, or will husband or papa or the neighbors catch on. Mike doesn’t have technique . . . but when Mike kisses you he isn’t doing anything else. You’re his whole universe . . . and the moment is eternal because he doesn’t have any plans and isn’t going anywhere. Just kissing you.

His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching.

Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more. All the wealthy, unhappy people youre ever met take sleeping pills; Mobile Infantrymen dont need them. Give a cap trooper a bunk and time to sack out in it and hes as happy as a worm in an apple - asleep.

It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and cant be enforced weakens all other laws.

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.

…majority rule gives the ruthless strong man plenty of elbow room to oppress his fellows.

Democracy cant work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, thats all there is-- so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.