Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

“Pay, are all paymasters dishonest?”
“Only the good ones.”

His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching.

This is why criminologists place more faith in circumstantial evidence than they do in the testimony of eyewitnesses. You are the ideal eyewitness, intelligent, sincere, cooperative, and honest. You have reported a mixture of what you did see, what you thought you saw, what you failed to notice although it was in front of you, and what your logical mind fills in as necessities linking what you saw and what you thought you saw. This mixture is now all solidly in your mind as a true memory, a firsthand, eyewitness memory. But it didn’t happen.

I had hit him in his male pride.
Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.

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.

When a cat greets you, he makes a big operation of it, bumping, stropping your legs, buzzing like mischief. But when he leaves, he just walks off and never looks back. Cats are smart.

When it comes down to it, the root cause of war is always population pressure no matter what other factors enter in.

“We see the history of the world as a series of crises in a conflict between two opposing philosophies. Ours is based on the notion that life, consciousness, intelligence, ego is the important thing in the world.”...“That puts us in conflict with every force that tends to destroy, deaden, degrade the human spirit, or to make it act contrary to its nature.”

Good government grows out of the people; it cannot be handed to them.

Wisdom includes not getting angry unnecessarily. The Law ignores trifles and the wise man does, too.

I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in. I noted the time — 10: 17 P.M. zone five, or eastern time, November 7th, 1970. Temporal agents always notice time and date; we must. The Unmarried Mother was a man twenty-five years old, no taller than I am, childish features and a touchy temper. I didn't like his looks — I never had — but he was a lad I was here to recruit, he was my boy. I gave him my best barkeep's smile.

Since when did a mathematician need any tools but his own head? Pythagoras had done well enough with a stick and a stretch of sand.

The answer to any question starting, "Why don't they—" is almost always, "Money".

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

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, One Meter Wide and Two Meters Long.