Browsing Quotes, page 107
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“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! -
“My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity… and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:49 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“So I will tell you something. Listen. Listen closely.
Of all that breathes and crawls across the earth,
Our mother earth breeds nothing feebler than a man.
So long as the gods grant him power, spring in his knees,
He thinks he will never suffer affliction down the years.
But then, when the happy gods bring on the long hard times,
Bear them he must, against his will, and steel his heart.
Our lives, our mood and mind as we pass across the earth,
Turn as the days turn…
As the father of men and gods makes each day dawn.” AmphinomusSpeaker: HomerPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:47 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
That is the gods’ work, spinning threads of death
through the lives of mortal men,
and all to make a song for those to come…Speaker: HomerPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:41 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“A pledge for a worthless man is a worthless pledge indeed.” Hephaestus
Speaker: HomerPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:41 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“In every venture the bold man comes off best” Odysseus
Speaker: HomerPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:40 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!
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