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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 78d530b | He shall rule them with a rod of iron. --Revelations II:25 | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| c84cc2c | Men are always for hire who like dirty work. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 02df1ed | The moment I put it on, that suit became an old, familiar, and valued friend--and I became taller and wider across the shoulders. It could not have fit better if it had been made on my body. It knew things about me I wouldn't learn for years yet, and approved of them all. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| cb3c515 | Being "up to something" was the unnamable and unforgiveable crime for which any American male could be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced in one breath. He wondered how things had gotten rigged so that the male half of the race must always behave to suit feminine rules and feminine logic, like a snotty-nosed school boy in front of a stern teacher." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 41dbe07 | it's well to take a look at what new rascals you are going to get before you jump at any chance to turn your present rascals out. Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried. Democracy's worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents--a depre.. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| ceefa5c | One more point. The aspect of Venus is most favorable and potentially dominant over that of Mars. Venus symbolizes yourself, of course, but Mars is both your husband and young Smith--as a result of the unique circumstances of his birth. This throws a double burden on you and you must rise to the challenge; you must demonstrate those qualities calm wisdom and restraint which are peculiarly those of woman. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 3e4c478 | The Japanese have five different ways to say 'thank you'--and every one of them translates literally as resentment, in various degrees. Would that English had the same built-in honesty on this point! Instead, English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing. 'Gratitude,' for example. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 19f4a7d | The second point I want to make is that you are right; the boy does indeed have to learn human customs. He must be taught to take off his shoes in a mosque and to wear his hat in a synagogue and to cover his nakedness when taboo requires it, or our tribal shamans will burn him for deviationism. But, child, by the myriad deceptive aspects of Ahriman, don't brainwash him in the process. Make sure he is cynical about each part of it. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 4276c24 | The problem with dictatorships--as I read somewhere recently--and with poisonous ideologies, too, is that they are like sharks. They must keep moving forward or die. What caused their aggression is not what you did. It's who they are. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 5099335 | Marrying Gretchen is a good idea, darling; I would enjoy bringing her up. Teaching her to shoot, helping her with her first baby, coaching her in how to handle a knife, working out with her in martial arts, all the homey domestic skills a girl needs in this modern world. | marriage skills | Robert A. Heinlein | |
| 74729c7 | To be court-martialed--for any reason--is eight times as bad for an officer as for an enlisted man. Offenses which will get privates kicked out (maybe with lashes, possibly without) rate death in an officer. Better never to have been born! | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 4d9f5d4 | You evaded my question." "Then perhaps you had better assume that I intended to evade it." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| e459e4a | She hesitated slightly. "I've seen what was called telekinesis with dice--but I'm no mathematician and I could not testify that what I saw was telekinesis." "Hell's bells, you wouldn't testify that the sun had risen if the day was cloudy." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| dbdafea | Your business, son." "Yes. Self. I must grok each cusp myself alone. And so must you . . . and so must each self. Thou art God." "I don't accept the nomination." "You can't refuse it. Thou art God and I am God and all that groks is God, and I am all that I have ever been or seen or felt or experienced. I am all that I grok." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| d9849ea | This school is based on the idea that a man who can think correctly will automatically behave morally--or | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| d17736d | I wouldn't want Larry to die through my oversight. Larry is entitled to work out his own damn foolishness without having it cut short through my carelessness. Duke, I believe in everyone's working out his own damnation his own way . . . but nevertheless that is no excuse for an adult to give a dynamite cap to a baby as a toy. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 9c1d10a | Strictly speaking, the Patrol is not a military organization at all." "Sir?" "I know, I know--you are trained to use weapons, you are under orders, you wear a uniform. But your purpose is not to fight, but to prevent fighting, by every possible means. The Patrol is not a fighting organization; it is the repository of weapons too dangerous to entrust to military men." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| ef54c6e | I'm not feisty. But when you're as small as I am and female if you don't stand up for your rights, you're sure to be pushed around by big, hairy, smelly men with delusions about male superiority. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 6784980 | I've never been able to understand 'faith' myself, nor to see how a just God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion out of an infinitude of false ones--by faith alone. It strikes me as a sloppy way to run an organization, whether a universe or a smaller one. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 2e1226a | Men on the surface of a planet are as helpless against men in spaceships as a man would be trying to conduct a rock-throwing fight from the bottom of a well. The man at the top of the well has gravity working for him. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 1a2029b | hurry" was not a concept that could be symbolized in the Martian language and therefore must be presumed to be unthinkable. Speed, velocity, simultaneity, acceleration, and other mathematical abstractions having to do with the pattern of eternity were part of Martian mathematics, but not of Martian emotion." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| a66e8cb | They flew her," Matt pointed out. "Sure they did--and my hat's off to them. But it takes heroes to fly a box as primitive as this and I'm not the hero type." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 15abb29 | answered his telephone himself if he happened to be at hand when it signalled because each call offered good odds that he would be justified in being gratifyingly rude to some stranger for daring to invade his privacy without cause--"cause" by Harshaw's definition, not by the stranger's." | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 48bdae2 | Baskalarinin isine burnunu sokmamak insanin sahip olabilecegi bilgeligin yuzde seksenidir... kalan yuzde yirmi de pek onemli degildir zaten. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| bb7006c | I did it for a little girl who was about to go charging out and maybe get herself killed much the same way--if I didn't do something. I did it because she was my guest and I temporarily stood in loco parentis to her. I did it because she was all guts and gallantry but too ignorant to be allowed to monkey with such a buzz saw; she'd get hurt. But you, my cynical and sin-stained chum, know all about those buzz saws. If your own asinine carele.. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 771af78 | Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 8f7e0bd | Dorcas, for the last twenty or thirty years I've been a worthless, useless, no-good parasite." She nodded and yawned again. "Everybody knows that." "Never mind the flattery. There comes a time in every man's life when he has to stop being sensible--a time to stand up and be counted--strike a blow for liberty--smite the wicked." -- | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 880f3d7 | There is no such thing as a humane war. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| fca13be | Human bipolarity was both the binding force and the driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerate on this point, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 9ad0a0c | Unexpected discorporation was always rare on Mars; Martian taste in such matters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death taking place at the appropriate and selected instant. This artist, however, had become so preoccupied with his work that he had forgotten to come in out of the cold; by the time his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He himself had not noticed his own discorporation and had gone right o.. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| a735d96 | I am only an egg. | only stranger | Robert A. Heinlein | |
| 163ad41 | First is our unbreakable rule that every candidate must be a trained trooper, blooded under fire, a veteran of combat drops. No other army in history has stuck to this rule, although some came close. Most great military schools of the past--Saint Cyr, West Point, Sandhurst, Colorado Springs--didn't even pretend to follow it; they accepted civilian boys, trained them, commissioned them, sent them out with no battle experience to command men .. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 1f36b7f | Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth stupid fumbling--oh, he conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid having government, any more than an individual man could escape his lifelong bondage to his bowels. But Harshaw did not have to like it. Simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it a "good." He wished that government would wander off and get lost!" | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 4cb2906 | Gratitude' is a euphemism for resentment. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 8c1e122 | That boy skates close to the edge, he always has. He's utterly fearless and that's how he's made his reputation. But the rabbit is never more than two jumps ahead of the coyote . . | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 01c2242 | Don't bawl over Ben--not in my presence. 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. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| cb17563 | The fact that Ben retained Cavendish shows how seriously he took the matter; you don't hunt rabbits with an elephant gun. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| c1de65c | There is an old song which asserts that 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted . . . and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| ed2a1cd | the government'--that's too sweeping a term. 'The government' is several million people, nearly a million in Washington alone. We have to ask ourselves: Whose toes were being stepped on? What person or persons? Not 'the government'--but what individuals? | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 780a327 | you are not in my debt. You can't be. Impossible--because I never do anything I don't want to do. Nor does anyone, but in my case I am always aware of it. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| d2e1445 | Son, quite aside from my own conditioned reflex against munching a roast haunch of--well, you, for example--quite aside from that trained-in emotional prejudice, for coldly practical reasons I regard our taboo against cannibalism as an excellent idea . . . because we are not civilized." "Huh?" "Obvious. If we didn't have a tribal taboo about the matter so strong that you honestly believed it was an instinct, I can think of a long list of pe.. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 2f573a1 | That old saw about "To understand all is to forgive all" is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them. My" | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 846e732 | 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. | sarcasm | Robert A. Heinlein | |
| b7ed70b | I suspect that there are just two sorts of lawyers: those who spend their efforts making life easy for other people--and parasites. | Robert A. Heinlein |