Browsing Quotes By Robert Heinlein, page 1
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Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 09 Feb 2014 at 5:55 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
A managed democracy is a wonderful thing – for the managers. And it’s greatest strength is a free press – when free is defined as “responsible,” and the managers define what is “irresponsible.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinSource: the Moon is a Harsh MistressPosted: 02 Dec 2013 at 9:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Anything which is physically possible can be made financially possible. Money is a bugaboo of small minds.
Speaker: Robert HeinleinSource: the Moon is a Harsh MistressPosted: 02 Dec 2013 at 9:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Certain types of loudmouth-ism should be a capital offense among decent people.
Speaker: Robert HeinleinSource: the Moon is a Harsh MistressPosted: 02 Dec 2013 at 9:24 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“The discipline,” repeated Jubal. “That’s what I like. The faith I was reared in didn’t require anybody to know anything. Just confess and be saved, and there you were, safe in the arms of Jesus. A man might be too stupid to count sheep… yet conclusively presumed to be one of God’s elect, guaranteed an eternity of bliss, because he had been 'converted.’ he might not even be a Bible student and certainly didn’t have to know anything else. This church doesn’t accept 'conversion’ as I grok it-”
“You grok correctly.”
“A person must start with a willingness to learn and follow it with long, hard study. I grok that is salutary.”
“More than salutary,” agreed Sam. “Indispensable. The concepts can’t be thought about without the language, and the discipline that results in this horn-of-plenty of benefits – from how to live without fighting to how to please your wife – all derive from conceptual logic… understanding who you are, why you’re here, how you tick – and behaving accordingly. Happiness is functioning the way a being is organized to function.”Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 12:00 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“The Prophet never asserted that he was the last of all prophets nor did he claim to have said all there was to say. Submission to God’s will is not to be a robot, incapable of choice and thus of sin. Submission can include – does include – utter responsibility for the fashion in which I, and each of us, shape the universe. It is ours to turn into a heavenly garden… or to rend and destroy.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 11:59 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“All your stomach can reflect is prejudice trained into you before you acquired reason.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 11:58 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“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.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 11:57 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“'Love’ is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 11:57 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times. Rodin died about the time the world started flipping its lid. His successors notes the amazing things he had done with light and shadow and mass and composition and they copied that part. What they failed to see was that the master told stories that laid bare the human heart. They became contemptuous of painting or sculpture that told stories – they dubbed such work 'literary.’ They went all out for abstractions.”
Jubal shrugged. “Abstract design is all right – for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is psuedo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience. These laddies who won’t deign to do that – or can’t – lost the public.”Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 11:57 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“An artist can see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is… and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be… more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart… no matter what the merciless hours have done. Look at her, Ben.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 11:56 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts – because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.
“...the goodness is in the laughing. I grok it as a bravery… and a sharing… against pain and sorrow and defeat.”Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 11:55 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“There are only three places to look. Science – and I was taught more about how the universe ticks while I was still in the nest than human scientists can yet handle. So much that I can’t talk to them, even about as elementary a gimmick as levitation. I’m not disparaging scientists. What they do is as it should be; I grok that fully. But what they are after is not what I am looking for – you don’t grok a desert by counting its grains of sand. Then there’s philosophy – supposed to tackle everything. Does it? All any philosopher comes out with is what he walked in with – except for self-deluders who prove their assumptions by their conclusions.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 11:55 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Jill, of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism’ is the worse. People do what they want to, every time. If it pains them to make a choice – if the choice looks like a 'sacrifice’ – you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness… the necessity of deciding between two things you want when you can’t have both. The ordinary bloke suffers every time he chooses between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids, between getting up to go to work or losing his job. But he always chooses what hurts least or pleasures most. The scoundrel and the saint make the same choices on a larger scale.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 11:54 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“'Grok’ means all of these. It means 'fear,’ it means 'love,’ it means 'hate’ – proper hate, for by the Martian 'map,’ you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you – then you can hate. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate .”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 11:47 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it is eight times as good as any other method. It’s worst fault is that its leaders reflect their constituents – a low level, but what can you expect? So look at Douglas and ponder that, in his ignorance, stupidity, and self-seeking, he resembles his fellow Americans but is a notch or two above average.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:55 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Man is the animal who laughs,” Jubal answered. … “Man born of woman and born to trouble… and some day you will grok its fullness and laugh – because man is the animal that laughs at himself.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:54 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
But with bleak honesty Jubal admitted that the Fosterites might own the Truth, the exact Truth, nothing but the Truth. The Universe was a silly place at best… but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings “just happened” to be atoms that “just happened” to get together in ways which “just happened” to look like consistent laws and some configurations “just happened” to possess self-awareness and that two “just happened” to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.
No, he could not swallow the “just happened” theory, popular as it was with men who called themselves scientists. Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe – random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:54 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Now, let’s get something straight: you are not in my debt. Impossible – because I never do anything I don’t want to. Nor does anyone, but in my case I know it. So please don’t invent a debt that does not exist, or next you will be trying to feel gratitude – and that is the treacherous first step toward complete moral degradation.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:52 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Oh, Harshaw conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it “good.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:50 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!