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The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion - in the long run, these are the only people who count.
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
Regularly
Long
Delusion
Think
Count
Thinking
People
Extremely
Fraction
Tiny
Fractions
Running
Accurately
Without
Creatively
Self
More quotes by Robert A. Heinlein
There are two ways of forming an opinion. One is the scientific method the other, the scholastic. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory.
Robert A. Heinlein
He's an honest politician--he stays bought.
Robert A. Heinlein
You don’t pay back, you pay forward.
Robert A. Heinlein
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.
Robert A. Heinlein
But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.
Robert A. Heinlein
It may take endless wars and unbearable population pressure to force-feed a technology to the point where it can cope with space. In the universe, space travel may be the normal birth pangs of an otherwise dying race. A test. Some races pass, some fail.
Robert A. Heinlein
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
Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you if you don't bet you can't win.
Robert A. Heinlein
Gratitude is a euphemism for resentment.
Robert A. Heinlein
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.
Robert A. Heinlein
How can I possibly put a new idea into your heads, if I do not first remove your delusions?
Robert A. Heinlein
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
Robert A. Heinlein
- I'm so busy doing what I must do that I don't have time for what I ought to do... and I never get a chance to do what I want to do! - Son, that's universal. The way to keep that recipe from killing you is occasionally to do what you want to do anyhow.
Robert A. Heinlein
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.
Robert A. Heinlein
Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes.
Robert A. Heinlein
Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it - especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.
Robert A. Heinlein
Budget the luxuries first.
Robert A. Heinlein
Democracy is a poor system of government at best the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.
Robert A. Heinlein
Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe---in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance the pot could not hold itself.
Robert A. Heinlein
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
