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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4d6aa24 | Everything and anything about a culture can be inferred from the shape of its language--and | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 72a319e | Being aware that he had but a short time to live and having neither Martian nor Kansan faith in immortality, he purposed to live each golden moment as eternity--without | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 8f7d81d | Correct or not, he felt himself to be a useless pensioner, an impotent object of charity. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| d6eb328 | Politics is not evil; politics is the human race's most magnificent achievement. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| f8c20ba | Mahmoud, sir. No, Doctor Mahmoud is not well. A--a slight nervous breakdown, sir." Van Tromp reflected that being dead drunk was the moral equivalent thereof." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 313a8ab | Good!" the creature echoed. "Doctor Nelson will be along in a minute. Feel like some breakfast?" All four symbols in the query were in Smith's vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard them rightly. He knew that he was food, but he did not "feel like" food. Nor had he had any warning that he might be selected for such an honor. He had not known that the food supply was such that it was necessary to reduce the corporate group.. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 73bd1fe | He knew vaguely that he did not want the nurse to die at that moment, even though it was certainly its right and possibly its obligation to do so. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 64f4924 | Ben Caxton, I will lie right here in the grass and starve before I will get up to push a button that is six inches from your right forefinger. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 6111eb7 | Want to back out?" Jill let out a long breath. "No. I've always wanted a life of crime. Will you teach me gangster lingo? I want to be a credit to you." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| be3df50 | In the fifteenth century the Pope deeded the entire western hemisphere to Spain and Portugal and nobody paid the slightest attention to the fact that the real estate was already occupied by several million Indians with their own laws, customs, and notions of property rights. His grant deed was pretty effective, too. Take a look at a western hemisphere map sometime and notice where Spanish is spoken and where Portuguese is spoken--and see ho.. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 2559eb9 | Smith felt distressed at the failure to respond in kind and interpreted it as failure on his own part. He realized miserably that, time after time, he had managed to bring agitation to these other creatures when his purpose had been to create oneness. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| deb3421 | And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of 'rights' . . . and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| f905621 | To support his austerely upholstered nest and its rabble staff he put forth minimum effort for maximum return simply because it was easier to be rich than to be poor--Harshaw merely wished to live exactly as he liked, doing whatever he thought was best for him. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 23c8e08 | What is 'truth'?" Mike asked. ("What is Truth?" asked a Roman judge, and washed his hands of a troublesome question. Jubal wished that he could do likewise.)" | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 9c7cab3 | Back to these young criminals--They probably were not spanked as babies; they certainly were not flogged for their crimes. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| cac3045 | A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom . . . and the other twenty percent isn't very important. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| fdf83ed | Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy--in fact, they're almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other. Both at once can produce unbearable turmoil--and | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 7804f87 | Peace" is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties which do not achieve page-one, lead-story prominence--unless that civilian is a close relative of one of the casualties. But, if there ever was a time in history when "peace" meant that there was no fighting going on, I have been unable to find out about it." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 2202c76 | Duke, almost the only human characteristic Mike seems to possess is an overwhelming desire to be liked. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 1924940 | My child, a true-confession story should never be tarnished by any taint of truth. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 3507fd7 | It took you long enough to answer your phone." "It's my phone, Mr. Secretary. Sometimes I don't answer it at all." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 59e02b1 | Either way, I have no wish to disturb a man sleeping in a gutter; I assume until proved otherwise that he belongs there. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 09a3ba4 | sometimes there just isn't any cure for a situation. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 7f8da01 | Acting per se, like all art, is a process of abstracting, of retaining only significant detail. But in impersonation any detail can be significant. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 9d9ca87 | When a cat greets you, he makes a big operation of it, bumping, stropping your legs, buzzing like mischief. But when he leaves, he just walks off and never looks back. Cats are smart." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| b6c869e | But, do you know, once you get used to it, it's rather cute. I mean, if a girl looks all right to start with, she still looks all right with her head smooth. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 5baebac | Matt, you are suffering from a disease of youth--you expect moral problems to have nice, neat, black-and-white answers. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| f6a9e45 | If I've reached the place where I'm a good influence on anybody, it's time I cultivated some new vices. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 20f0a3d | She might get high enough to crash--no higher. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 19896be | Ben m'boy," Jubal said gently, "as a reporter you are hard-working and sometimes readable." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| ecc25f9 | Another common error is to identify 'Apollonian' with 'good'--merely because our most respectable sects are all rather Apollonian in ritual and precept. Mere local prejudice. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 7845a2d | Need I point out that, despite the old saw about uneasy heads and crowns, it is nevertheless safer to be publicly a king than it is to be a pretender in hiding? A king can usually abdicate to save his neck; a pretender may renounce his pretensions but it makes his neck no safer--less so, in fact; it leaves him naked to his enemies. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 77ce19c | If a word for a concept isn't in a language, then its culture simply doesn't have the referent the missing word would symbolize." "Oh, twaddle, Stinky! Animals fight--and ants even conduct wars. Are you trying to tell me they have to have words for it before they can do it?" | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 30d559b | Hell, was no military man; was computer technician who had bumbled into wrong field. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| c10b769 | A verbalizing race has words for every old concept . . . and creates new words or new definitions for old words whenever a new concept comes along. Always! A nervous system that is able to verbalize cannot avoid verbalizing; it's automatic. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 1bdc378 | Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| f7d244a | Minds me of a married woman who was very proud of her virtue. She slept with other men only when her husband was away. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| eee76ae | But he described our shortcomings, physical, mental, moral, and genetic, in great and insulting detail. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| bed1221 | We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time--we've never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| fed6516 | What a man doesn't know he can't spill if he is captured; neither drugs, nor torture, nor brainwash, nor endless lack of sleep can squeeze out a secret he doesn't possess. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| ab6ed56 | Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this?--TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out. Poor arithmetic . . . but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature--a racial conviction that when one huma.. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 120517e | When you read about chemistry and physics, you want to do them too. | education experiments | Robert A. Heinlein | |
| e49d127 | Mother had the social restraint of an ambassador. | emotions-communication self-discipline | Robert A. Heinlein | |
| 8ba2603 | More depended on the student than on the school. | education maturation openness | Robert A. Heinlein |