Robert A. Heinlein Quotes - Page 2

Once can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.

One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.

But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing, I became too stink in’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees.

Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.

One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.

Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.

No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain.

Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.

People simplify 'Apollonian' into 'mild', and 'calm', and 'cool'. But 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin-a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox.

The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

Men are not potatoes!

Sex, whatever else it is, is an athletic skill. The more you practice, the more you can, the more you want to, the more you enjoy it, the less it tires you.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Yes, sir, there are things to see and do on the French Riviera without spending money.

It's a long story. Want a refill?"
"No, let's start the steak. Where's the button?"
"Right here."
"Well, push it."
"Me? You offered to cook."
"Ben Caxton, I will lie here and starve before I will get up to push a button six inches from your finger"
"As you wish." He pressed the button. "But don't forget who cooked dinner.

I'm too much old-timer to be rude to a woman no matter what - they have so much of what we have none of.

I waited. Women talk when they want to. Or don't.

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. [He is also a fool.]

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.

He had learned that close-held secrets could often be cracked by going all the way to the top and there making himself unbearably unpleasant. He knew that such twisting of the tiger's tail was dangerous, for he understood the psychopathology of great power.