Robert A. Heinlein quotes - page 24

I have never been impressed by the formal schools of ethics. I had sampled them - public libraries are a ready source of recreation for an actor short of cash - but I had found them as poor in vitamins as a mother-in-law's kiss. Given time and plenty of paper, a philosopher can prove anything. I had the same contempt for the moral instruction handed to most children. Much of it is prattle and the parts they really seem to mean are dedicated to the sacred proposition that a "good” child is one who does not disturb mother's nap and a "good” man is one who achieves a muscular bank account without getting caught. No, thanks! (Robert A. Heinlein)
There is solemn satisfaction in doing the best you can for eight billion people. Perhaps their lives have no cosmic significance, but they have feelings. They can hurt. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
When you're rich, you don't have friends; you just have endless acquaintances. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it - once you can honestly say, "I don't know", then it becomes possible to get at the truth. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
Ninety percent of all human wisdom is the ability to mind your own business. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show - it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's 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. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don't walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don't know how to describe it, but it's much more complex and utterly delightful. They don't move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions . . . and all of it graceful. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. (Robert A. Heinlein)
Audacity, always audacity - soundest principal of strategy. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
Of all the strange crimes that human beings have legislated of nothing, blasphemy is the most amazing - with obscenity and indecent exposure fighting it out for the second and third place. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
Stinky says women should be obscene but not heard. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
A little more money won't do you any good - because daughters can use up ten percent more than a man can make in any normal occupation, regardless of the amount. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
The golden sunshine of Italy congealed into tears. Here's to alcoholic brotherhood ... much more suited to the frail human soul, if any, than any other sort. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
The mind's ability to rationalize it's own shortcomings is unlimited; I am no exception. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
But, do you know, once you get used to it's rather cute. I mean, if a girl looks alright to start with, she still looks alright with her head smooth. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
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 tiger's tail was dangerous, for he understood the psychopathology of great power. (Robert A. Heinlein)
The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for---if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
Another ingredient in a happy marriage Budget the luxuries first Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
The bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids arenÆt even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madmanÆs conception of a giant intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein