Robert A. Heinlein

"Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity."

"Love" is a 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"

"Heinlein's Rules for Writers Rule One: You Must Write Rule Two: Finish What Your Start Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold"

"Never try to out-stubborn a cat."

"... I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write...writing is antisocial. It's as solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is likely to turn and bite right to the bone... and not even know that he's doing it. As writers' wives and husbands often learn to their horror...there is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured. In a household with more than one person, of which one is a writer, 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. Because, if you disturb the patient at such times, he may break into tears or become violent. Or he may not hear you at all... and, if you shake him at this stage, he bites..."

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something."

"Anything which is physically possible can be made financially possible, if the people of a state desire it."

"Could dump two Chinee down in one of our maria and they would get rich selling rocks to each other while raising twelve kids. Then a Hindu would sell retail stuff he got from them wholesale--below cost at a fat profit. We got along."

"Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is-- so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group."

"…majority rule gives the ruthless strong man plenty of elbow room to oppress his fellows."

"The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome."

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

"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."

"Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."

"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 - but one cannot have both."

"The less respect an older person deserves the more certain he is to demand it from anyone younger."

"Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw"

"Good!” the creature echoed. “Doctor Nelson will be along in a minute. Feel like breakfast?”All symbols were in Smith’s vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard rightly. He knew that he was food, but he did not “feel like” food. Nor had he any warning that he might be selected for such honor."

"You. What is the moral difference, ifany, between the soldier and the civilian"The difference," I answered carefully, "lies in the field of civicvirtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the bodypolitic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not."

"But how, from the viewpoint of a Martian, did man differ from other animals? Would a race that could levitate and god knows what else be impressed by engineering? If so would the Aswan Dam or a thousand miles of coral reef win first prize? Man's self awareness, sheer conceit. There was no way to prove that sperm whales and sequoias were not philosophers and poets exceeding any human merit?"