Robert A. Heinlein Quotes - Page 4

Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate - and quickly.

TANSTAAFL: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

Secrecy begets tyranny.

Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category with the classic example 'a little bit pregnant.

Property is not the natural and obvious and inevitable concept that most people think it is.

Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds.

Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.

Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight.

Ben, why should anybody want that much power?"
"Why does a moth fly toward light?

He became convinced that ordinary commercial financing could be done for a service charge plus an insurance fee amounting to much less that the current rates of interest charged by banks, whose rates were based on supply and demand, treating money as a commodity rather than as a sovereign state's means of exchange.

Daughters can spend ten percent more than a man can make in any usual occupation. That’s a law of nature, to be known henceforth as ‘Harshaw’s Law.

A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.

Customs, morals-is there a difference?

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist's view, 'justice' is a search for workable customs.

The drive for power is even less logical than the sex urge . . . and stronger.

Oh, you have to charge 'em, Jubal. The marks won't pay attention if it's free.

Belief gets in the way of learning.