Miscelaneous Heinlein
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These quotes are alphabetical
by the story they appeared in.
Quotes from short storys
are listed by the short story not the larger book.
For example "The Green
Hills of Earth" appears in The Past Through Tomorrow,
but a quote from
it will be alphabetized by "Earth." Quotes not from stories appear
first.
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So far as I know, every such story has alien intelligences
which treat humans
as approximate equals, either as friends or foes. It is
assumed that A-I will either be friends, anxious to communicate and trade,
or enemies who will fight and kill, or possibly enslave, the human race.
There is another and more humiliating possibility-alien intelligences so
superior to us and so indifferent to us as to be almost unaware of
us. They do not even covet the surface of the planet where we live
- they live in the stratosphere. We do not know whether they
evolved here or elsewhere - will never know. Our mightiest engineering
formations they regard as coral formations, i.e., seldom noticed and considered
of no importance.We aren't even nuisances to them. And they are no
threat to us, except that their engineering might occasionally disturb
our habitat, as the grading done for a highway disturbs gopher holes. Some
few of them might study us casually - or might not.
-RH himself
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Lately some literary critics have been condemning my stories
as being "elitist"
and concerned only with superior people--instead of the
little people,
the common people, the born losers. Those critics are correct:
the sort of hero
I like to write about is a boy from a broken home and a poverty
stricken
background who pulls himself up by his bootstraps...
Heinlein
in Personal communication, letter of 15 June 1981.
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I'm afraid of coaching, of writer's classes, of writer's
magazines of books on
how to write. They give me "centipede trouble" - you know
the yarn about
the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet?
He tried to answer,
stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another
step.
RH himself
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damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned,
you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave,
sleeping with one eye open. There wasn't anyway to be safe;
just being alive was deadly dangerous... fatal. In the end.
- Daniel Boone Davis in the Door into Summer.
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A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven
for?
-Hugh in Farnham's Freehold.
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Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never
kick a man in the balls.
Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.
-Friday Jones in Friday
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The great trouble with religion -- any religion -- is that a
religionist, having accepted
certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those
propositions
by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose
to live
in the bleak uncertainty of reason -- one cannot have both.
-Boss in Friday
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I knew, logically, that everything that had happened since I
read that silly ad
had been impossible.So I chucked logic. Logic is a feeble
reed, friend.
"Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs
won't work
and that stones don't fall out of the sky.Logic is a way
of saying that anything
which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.
Oscar Gordon in Glory Road
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"Dum vivimus, vivamus!" - "While we live, let us live!"
Star in Glory Road
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What did I want?
I wanted a Roc's egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely
odalisques less than
the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never
stained my sword. I wanted
raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist, and feed that
lousy claim jumper to
the huskies!
I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances,
then pick
a likely wench for my droit du seigneur - I wanted to stand
up to the Baron
and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple
water
chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the
morning watch
and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting
of the wings
of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.
I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende
and Poictesme,
and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, "The game's afoot!"
I wanted to float
down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with
the
Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white
arm out of a silent lake.
I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and
to eat the lotus
in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling
of romance and
the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world
to be the way they had
promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy,
fouled-up mess it is.
I had had one chance - for ten minutes yesterday afternoon.
Helen of Troy,
whatever your true name may be - and I had known it and I had
let it slip away.
Maybe one chance is all you ever get.
- Oscar Gordon in Glory Road.
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...secrecy is the keystone of tyranny. Not force, but secrecy...censorship.
When any government, or any chuch for that matter, undertakes to say to
its subjects,
"This you may not reed, this you must not see, this you
are forbidden to know,"
the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how
holy the motives.
Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose
mind has been hoodwinked;
contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man,
a man whose mind is free.
No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything - you can't
conquer a free man;
the most you can do is kill him.
from "If This Goes On-"
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Eunice, sex is the one subject everybody lies about. But what
I was saying is this:
A man who takes his fun where he finds it, then
marries and expects his wife
to be different, is a fool. I wasn't that sort of fool. Let
me tell you about Agnes.
Miss Smith, nee' Johann Sebastian Bach Smith in I Will Fear
No Evil
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TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
From The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
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A rational anarchist believes that concepts, such as 'state'
and 'society'
and 'government' have no existence save as physically exemplified
in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible
to shift blame,
share blame, distribute blame.. as blame, guilt, responsibility
are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere
else. But being rational,he knows
that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to
live perfectly in an
imperfect world.. aware that his efforts will be less than perfect
yet
undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failiure.
From The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
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If there was one thing all people took for granted, it was the
conviction
that if you feed honest figures into a computer,honest
figures come out.
Never doubted it myself until I met a computer with sense
of humor.
-Manuel O'Kelly Davis in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
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I'm not going to argue whether a machine can "really" be alive,
"really" be self-aware. Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about
oyster? I doubt it.
A cat? Almost certainly. A human? Don't know about you,
tovarishch, but I am.
Manuel Garcia O'Kelly in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
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Piffle, dear, I don't have morals, just customs.
-Hilda in Number of the Beast.
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"Peace is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention
to military casualties which do not achieve page-one, lead-story-
-unless that civilian is a close relative of one of the casualties.
But, if there ever was a time in history when "peace"
meant that
there was no fighting going on, I have been unable to find out
about it.
-Rico in Starship Troopers
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May you live as long as you wish, and love as long as you live.
-Minerva in Time Enough for Love.
Note: all other quotes
from Time Enough for Love are by Lazarus Long and so appear on that
page.
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I've said this nineteen dozen times but you still don't
believe it.
Man is the one animal that can't be tamed.
He goes along for years, peaceful as a cow, when
it suits him.
Then when it suits him not to be, he makes a leopard
look like a tabby cat.
Which goes double for the female of the species.
The Deacon in Tunnel In The Sky.
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What good is the race of man?
Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a spot of poetry in
them,
cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string
star.
But sometimes they finish in style.
-Potiphar (Potty) Breen in 'The Year of the Jackpot.'
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