Robert A. Heinlein quotes - page 14
We don't have to be convincing-not in the sense of getting converts. Real converts might prove to be a nuisance. We just have to be convincing enough to look like a legitimate religion to our overlords. And that doesn't have to be very convincing. All religions look equally silly from the outside.
Robert A. Heinlein
There is no subject inappropriate for scientific research. Johann, we've let you fellows have a monopoly of such matters for too long. The most serious questions in the world have been left to faith or speculation. It is time for scientists to cope with them, or admit that science is no more than pebble counting.
Robert A. Heinlein
I missed my slipstick. Dad says that anyone who can't use a slide rule is a cultural illiterate and should not be allowed to vote. Mine is a beauty - a K&E 20-inch Log-log Duplex Decitrig. Dad surprised me with it after I mastered a ten-inch polyphase. We ate potato soup that week - but Dad says you should always budget luxuries first. I knew where it was. Home on my desk.
Robert A. Heinlein
Mass psychology is not simply a summation of individual psychologies; that is a prime theorem of social psychodynamics-not just my opinion; no exception has ever been found to this theorem. It is the social mass-action rule, the mob-hysteria law, known and used by military, political, and religious leaders, by advertising men and prophets and propagandists, by rabble rousers and actors and gang leaders, for generations before it was formulated in mathematical symbols. It works.
Robert A. Heinlein
The attack should not have happened, of course. The rice farmer sergeant had been perfectly right; the Federation could not afford to risk its own great cites to punish the villagers of Venus. He was right-from his viewpoint.
A rice farmer has one logic; the men who live by and for power have another and entirely different logic. Their lives are built on tenuous assumptions, fragile as reputation; they could not afford to ignore a challenge to their power-the Federation could not afford not to punish the insolent colonists.
Robert A. Heinlein
Chief, perhaps it would be clearest to say that the fasarta modulates the garbab in such a phase relationship that the thrimaleen is forced to bast-or, to put it another way, somebody loosed mice in the washroom. Seriously, there is no popular way to explain it. If you were willing to spend five hard years with me, working up through the math, I could probably bring you to the same level of ignorance and confusion that I enjoy.
Robert A. Heinlein
Let me get this,” the Old Man said. "You are promising the human race that, if we will just surrender, you will take care of us and make us happy. Right?”
"Exactly!”
The Old Man studied this while looking past my shoulders. He spat on the floor. "You know,” he said slowly, "me and my kind, we have often been offered that bargain. It never worked out worth a damn.
Robert A. Heinlein
