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Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.

Robert A. Heinlein

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Robert A. Heinlein
Age: 80 †
Born: 1907
Born: July 7
Died: 1988
Died: May 8
Essayist
Literary Critic
Naval Officer
Novelist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Science Writer
Screenwriter
Stonemason
Writer
Butler
Missouri
Robert Anson Heinlein
Anson MacDonald
Lyle Monroe
John Riverside
Caleb Saunders
Simon York
Thinking
Carry
Field
Fields
Knowledge
Often
Narrower
Science
Expertise
Doe
Experts
Think
Likely

More quotes by Robert A. Heinlein

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War is not violence and killing, pure and simple war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing... but controlled and purposeful violence.
Robert A. Heinlein
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It was better to live with disappointment and frustration than to live without hope.
Robert A. Heinlein
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Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?
Robert A. Heinlein
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Every Congressman, every Senator knows precisely what causes inflation... but can't, [won't] support the drastic reforms to stop it [repeal of the Federal Reserve Act] because it could cost him his job.
Robert A. Heinlein
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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'.
Robert A. Heinlein
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Learn to say No—and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you.
Robert A. Heinlein
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Being generous is inborn being altruistic is a learned perversity. No resemblance --
Robert A. Heinlein
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I came, I saw, she conquered. The original Latin seems to have been garbled.
Robert A. Heinlein
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When it don’t rain, the roof don’t leak when it rains, I can’t fix it nohow.
Robert A. Heinlein
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Nor would anybody suspect. If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor.
Robert A. Heinlein
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Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.
Robert A. Heinlein
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...more than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest.
Robert A. Heinlein
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Since when was an emotional argument won by logic?
Robert A. Heinlein
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Have you ever noticed how much they look like orchids? lovely!
Robert A. Heinlein
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I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats—I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures.
Robert A. Heinlein
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All my enemies are self-appointed.
Robert A. Heinlein
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Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
Robert A. Heinlein
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A skunk is better company than a person who prides himself on being 'frank'.
Robert A. Heinlein
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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.
Robert A. Heinlein
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How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show - it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.
Robert A. Heinlein