Quotations from Robert A. Heinlein (part 1)

From Assignment in Eternity, vol. one: (in the short story Elsewhen)

p111: "A fact doesn't have to be understood to be true. Sure, any reasonable mind wants explanations, but it's silly to reject facts that don't fit your philosophy."

From Assignment in Eternity, vol. two: (in the short story Lost Legacy)

p17: "There really isn't anything to philosophy. Did you ever eat that cotton candy they sell at fairs? Well, philosophy is like that -- it looks as if were really something, and it's awfully pretty, and it tastes sweet, but when you go to bite it you can't get your teeth into it, and when you try to swallow, there isn't anything there. Philosophy is word-chasing, as significant as a puppy chasing its tail."

From Beyond This Horizon:

p84: "Why anyone should voluntarily associate day after day with a mob of yelling sticky little brats was beyond him."

From The Cat Who Walks Through Walls:

p6: "Life is filled with tragedy; if you let it overwhelm you, you cannot enjoy life's innocent pleasures."

p7: "A friend who offers help without asking for explanations is a treasure beyond price."

p26: "If one tolerates bad manners, they grow worse."

p31: "In the killing business one should never kill first and ask questions afterwards. That tends to annoy people."

p36: "Writing is a legal way of avoiding work without actually stealing and one that doesn't take any talent or training."

p62: "Never pick up a stray kitten ... unless you've already made up your mind to be owned by it."

p220: "Shrinks are the blind leading the blind; even the best of them are dealing from a short deck. Anyone who consults a shrink should have his head examined."

p244: "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."

p393: "An intellectual is a highly educated man who can't do arithmetic with his shoes on, and is proud of his lack."

p397: "Women and cats do what they do; there is nothing a man can do about it."

From Citizen of the Galaxy

p98: " 'Justice' is a search for workable customs."

p113: "A wise man could not be insulted, since truth could not insult and untruth was not worthy of notice."

p122: "When you're on their planet, do it their way ... it's good business."

p141: "Since he had no talent he became an actor."

p146: "Nobody has ever seen an electron. Nor a thought. You can't see a thought, you can't measure, weigh, nor taste it -- but thoughts are the most real things in the Galaxy."

From Double Star

p32: "The things men live by are rarely subject to logical proof."

p77: "To my mind there is something immoral and degrading in an absolute cosmic sense in tampering with a man's personality. Murder is clean in comparison, a mere peccadillo."

p87: "There is no such thing as a dirty game. But you sometimes run into dirty players."

From Expanded Universe

p28: "Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat."

p147: "If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course!"

p174: "A person who won't be blackmailed, can't be blackmailed."

p181: "Anything you get free costs more than worth -- but you don't find it out until later."

p372: "Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanour."

p379: "Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?"

p387: "Being right too soon is socially unacceptable."

p421: "The early worm deserves the bird."

p445: "The three biggest lies in the USA today:

1) The check is in the mail.
2) I gave at the office.
3) (Big, cheery smile) 'Hello! I'm from Washington. I'm here to help you!' "

p514: "I shot an error into the air.
It's still going ... everywhere."

From Farmer in the Sky

p18: "People have a funny habit of taking as 'natural' whatever they are used to -- but there hasn't been any 'natural' environment, the way they mean it, since men climbed down out of trees."

p147: "You can grieve only so much; after that it's self pity."

From Farnham's Freehold

p34: "You don't own a cat, he is a free citizen."

p66: "No one ever does anything but what he wants to do -- 'enjoys' -- within the possibilities open to him. If I change a tire, it's because I enjoy it more than being stranded."

p75: "It is impossible for anyone to be responsible for another person's behaviour."

p244: "No one is ever responsible for another person's actions."

From Friday

p12: "No matter how lavishly overpaid, civil servants everywhere are convinced that they are horribly underpaid -- but all public employees have larceny in their hearts or they wouldn't be feeding at the public trough."

p151: "The coldest depth of Hell is reserved for people who abandon kittens."

p293: "A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot."

p302: "Don't ever tackle a lawyer with your hands. The way to fight a lawyer is with another lawyer, a smarter one."

p305: "A religion is sometimes a source of happiness and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not the strong ... 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."

p310: "There are just two sorts of lawyers: those who spend their efforts making life easy for other people -- and parasites."

p392-393: "Knowing too much is a capital offence. In politics it always has been. ... Throughout history the conventional way of dealing with an awkward witness has been to arrange for him to stop breathing."

From Glory Road

p9: "The structure of military organisations: Regardless of T.O., all military bureaucracies consist of a Surprise Party Department, a Practical Joke Department, and a Fairy Godmother Department. The first two process most matters as the third is very small; the Fairy Godmother Department is one elderly female GS-5 clerk usually out on sick leave."

p27: "It looked as if the boys (just big playful boys!) who run this planet were about to hold that major war, the one with ICBMs and H-bombs, any time now.

"If a man went as far south as New Zealand there might be something left after the fallout fell out.

"New Zealand is supposed to be very pretty and they say that a fisherman there regards a five-pound trout as too small to take home.

"I had caught a two-pound trout once."

p50: "Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow."

p63: "Coffee comes in five descending stages: Coffee, Java, Jamoke, Joe, and Carbon Remover."

p139: "The American Eagle eats carrion, never tackles anything its own size, and will soon be extinct ... a symbol means what you put into it."

p197: "The one invariant custom was: Don't impose your customs on me."

p252: A cocktail party: "People who don't like each other particularly, standing around (never enough chairs), talking about things they aren't interested in, drinking drinks they don't want (why set a time to take a drink?) and getting high so that they won't notice they aren't having fun."

From Grumbles from the Grave

p55: "Speculative fiction (I prefer that term to science fiction) is also concerned with sociology, psychology, esoteric aspects of biology, impact of terrestrial culture on the other cultures we may encounter when we conquer space, etc., without end. However, speculative fiction is not fantasy fiction, as it rules out the use of anything as material which violates established scientific fact, laws of nature, call it what you will, i.e., it must be possible to the universe as we know it.

p264: "A personal God is unproveable, most unlikely, and all contemporary theology is superstitious twaddle insulting to a mature mind. But atheism and 'scientific humanism' are the same sort of piffle in mirror image, and are just as repugnant. Agnosticism is intellectually more acceptable but only in that it pleads ignorance, utter intellectual bankruptcy, and gives up. All the other religions, elsewhere and in the past, whether monotheistic, polytheistic, or other, are just as silly, and the very notion of 'worship' is intellectually on all fours with a jungle savage's appeasing of Mumbo Jumbo. (In passing, I note that Christianity is a polytheism, not a monotheism as claimed -- the rabbis are right on that point -- and that its most holy ceremony is ritualistic cannibalism, right straight out of the smoky caves of our dim past. They ought to lynch me.)"

p284: "A rational human being does not need answers, spoon-fed to him on 'faith'; he needs questions to worry over -- serious ones. The quality of the answers then depends on him ... and he may revise those answers several times in the course of a long life, (hopefully) getting a little closer to the truth each time. But I would never undertake to be a 'Prophet,' handing out neatly packaged answers to lazy minds."

From I Will Fear No Evil

p198: "The idiot box is for idiots."

p238: "When you have eliminated what you can't do, what remains is what you must do."

p299: "Nothing is good or bad in itself, just in its effects."

From The Menace from Earth: (in the short story The Year of the Jackpot)

p19: "A fact has no 'why.' There it stands, self demonstrating."

From The Menace from Earth: (in the short story By His Bootstraps)

p81: The principle of nonidentity: "Nothing is identical with anything else, not even with itself."

From The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

p122: " 'Tanstaafl.' Means 'There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.' "

p122: "Anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless."

p230: "There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

p231: "Government is an inescapable disease of human beings."

From 'The Number of the Beast'

p14: "Tomorrow I will seven eagles see, a great comet will appear, and voices will speak from whirlwinds foretelling monstrous and fearful things -- This Universe never did make sense; I suspect that it was built on government contract."

p39: "Mathematics can never prove anything. No mathematics has any content. All any mathematics can do is -- sometimes -- turn out to be useful in describing some aspects of our so-called 'physical universe'. That is a bonus; most forms of mathematics are as meaning-free as chess."

p56: "Lack of data never justifies a conclusion."

p56: "The world is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine."

p70: Murphy's Law: "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."

p77: Clarke's Law: "How to make a great discovery or create a key invention. Study what the most respected authorities agree can not be done -- then do it."

p106: Kettering's Law: "Logic is an organised way of going wrong with confidence."

p137: "Floccinaucinihilipilification": the action or habit of estimating as worthless.

p373: "Pantheistic multiperson solipsism":

Pantheistic: belief that God and the universe are equal -- God is everything and everything is God (i.e. Gaea).

Solipsism: the theory that self is the only object of real knowledge or is the only thing really existent.

p440: "Tomorrow is soon enough to unravel any paradox. Or the Day After Tomorrow. Better yet, Not This October. After The End of Eternity may be best."

p476: Murphy's Law (again): "Given any possible chance, it will go wrong. Anything."

From Orphans of the Sky

p29: "I want to see whether that's a head he has on his shoulders, or just a place to hang his ears."

p129: "When an apparent fact runs contrary to logic and common sense, it's obvious that you have failed to interpret the fact correctly."

From Red Planet

p16: "Never listen to newscasts. Saves wear and tear on the nervous system."

From Stranger in a Strange Land:

p133: "Man is the animal that laughs at himself."

p289: "... why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts ... because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting."

p290: "I had thought -- I had been told -- that a 'funny' thing is a thing of goodness. It isn't. Not ever is it funny to the person it happens to. The goodness is in the laughing. ... it is a bravery -- and a sharing -- against pain and sorrow and defeat."