Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

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.

Protoplasm is protean; any simple protoplasm can become any complex form of life under mutation and selection.

What is a “concrete” word? It is a spell-symbol used to tag something you can point to and thereby agree on, e. g., “cat,” “sailboat,” “ice-skating”—agree with such certainty that when you say “sailboat’’ there is no chance whatever that I will think you mean a furry quadruped with retractile claws.
With the spell symbol “God” there is no way to achieve such agreement because there is nothing to point to.

“We’re going to die. Aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Before morning?”
“Oh, no! I feel sure we can live till noon.”

The future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands...with tools...with horse sense and science and engineering.

“Die trying” is the proudest human thing.

Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

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 used to wonder what it was like to be rich. Now I am and it turns out to be mostly headaches.

Poddy’s greatest weakness—the really soft place in her head, she’s not too stupid otherwise—is her almost total inability to grasp that some people are as bad as they are. Evil. Poddy never has understood evil. Naughtiness is about as far as her imagination reaches.

Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn't give up, Ben; she's still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She's a father working while cancer eats away his insides, to bring home one more pay check. She's a twelve-year-old trying to mother her brothers and sisters because mama had to go to Heaven. She's a switchboard operator sticking to her post while smoke chokes her and fire cuts off her escape. She's all the unsung heroes who couldn't make it but never quit.

I have never been able to see life as anything but a vast complicated practical joke, and it’s better to laugh than cry.

Heroism' often consists in keeping your head in an emergency and doing the best you can with what you have instead of panicking and being shot in the tail. People who fight this way win more battles than do intentional heroes; a glory hound often throws away the lives of his mates as well as his own.

For vice has this defect; it cannot be truly intelligent. Its very motives are its weakness.