Robert A. Heinlein
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.Collection: Jealousy
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.Collection: Jealousy
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.Collection: Pet
May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.Collection: Anniversary
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.Collection: Travel
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.Collection: Religion
An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.Collection: Good
There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.Collection: Food
Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.Collection: Science
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Science
I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. 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.Collection: Alone
They didn't want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.Collection: Good
Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again.Collection: Funny
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.Collection: Power
The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.Collection: Government
A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.Collection: Society
I never learned from a man who agreed with me.Collection: Learning
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Government
Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.
One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering. 'Supernatural' is a null word.
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss.
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.
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.
Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.
No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.
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.
The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.
Sex without love is merely healthy exercise.
By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.
One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.
For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
Never insult anyone by accident.
It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.
Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.
Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.
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.
I don't see how an article of clothing can be indecent. A person, yes.
[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously-after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important ... so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth.Collection: Athlete
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.Collection: Life
You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Inspirational
As it says in Bible, God fights on side of heaviest artillery.Collection: Fighting
Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.Collection: Fashion
It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.Collection: Country
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.Collection: Stupidity
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.Collection: Loss