Quotes By Robert A. Heinlein

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss.

Don't ever become a pessimist... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.

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

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... 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.

Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again.

Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.

No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.

One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.

Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.

They didn't want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.

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

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

Never insult anyone by accident.

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.

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

To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.

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

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.

The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.