Friday Quotes

“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, Friday

“I don't see why human people make such a heavy trip out of sex. It isn't anything complex, it is simply the best thing in life, even better than food.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“One should not attend even the end of the world without a good breakfast.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“The coldest depth of Hell is reserved for people who abandon kittens.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named...but 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, Friday

“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.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can't be enforced weakens all other laws.”
― Robert A Heinlein, Friday

“Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“People who are busy and happy don't write diaries; they are too busy living.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Study it yourself. If I told you, you would not know; you simply would have been told.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“A religion is sometimes a source of happiness and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong---and you are strong. 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 in at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason---but one cannot have both,”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“A public employee, having no self-respect, needs and demands a show of public respect.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Pick one. A theocracy ruled by witchburners. Or a fascist socialism designed by schoolboys. Or a crowd of hard-boiled pragmatists who favor shooting the horse that misses the hurdle. Step right up! Only one to a customer.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“How many people have died because they would not abandon their baggage?”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“from the strictest humanitarian viewpoint, any attempt to stop the processes by which overcrowded cities purge themselves is not a kindness. Plague is a nasty death but a quick one. Starvation also is a nasty death…but a very slow one.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“For some tense moments it seemed that we were going to be hanged or shot or at least locked up forever in their deepest dungeon for the crime of not being Californians.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“I suspect that there are just two sorts of lawyers: those who spend their efforts making life easy for other people—and parasites.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“But a well-run tyranny is almost as scarce as an efficient democracy.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“I would be—and will be—much disappointed in you if you ever simply injure a policeman. A wounded policeman is more dangerous than a wounded lion.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“A credit card is a leash around your neck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy…or at best protects her privacy only with great effort and much chicanery. Besides that, do you ever know what the computer network is doing when you poke your card into a slot? I don’t. I feel much safer with cash. I’ve never heard of anyone who had much luck arguing with a computer.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named…but 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, Friday

“[A person], having no self-respect, needs and demands a show of public respect.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Danny Boy, you are not going to patent the gadget. What would it get you? Seventeen years at the most…and no years at all in three-fourths of the world. If you did patent, or try to, Edison, and P.G. and E…and Standard would tie you up with injunctions and law suits and claimed infringements and I don’t know what all. But you said yourself that you could put one of your gadgets in a room with the best research team G.A. has to offer and the best they could do would be to melt it down and the worse would be that they would blow themselves up. You said that. Did you mean it?” “Certainly. If they don’t know how I insert the—” “Hush! I don’t want to know. And walls have ears. We don’t make any fancy announcements; we simply start manufacturing. Wherever power is cheapest today. Where is that?”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Democrats were being rounded up, sentenced by drumhead courts-martial (provost’s tribunals, they were called) and executed on the spot—laser, gunfire, some hangings.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“The people’s right to know” —the people’s right to know what? Daniel Shipstone, having first armed himself with great knowledge of higher mathematics and physics, went down into his basement and patiently suffered seven lean and weary years and thereby learned an applied aspect of natural law that let him construct a Shipstone. Any and all of “the people” are free to do as he did—he did not even take out a patent. Natural laws are freely available to everyone equally, including flea-bitten Neanderthals crouching against the cold. In this case, the trouble with “the people’s right to know” is that it strongly resembles the “right” of someone to be a concert pianist—but who does not”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“So what is their crime? Twofold: a) The Shipstone companies are guilty of supplying energy to the human race at prices below those of their competitors; b) They meanly and undemocratically decline to share their industrial secret of the final assembly stage of a Shipstone.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“with all governments everywhere tightening down on everything wherever they can, with their computers and their Public Eyes and ninety-nine other sorts of surveillance, there is a moral obligation on each free person to fight back wherever possible—keep underground railways open, keep shades drawn, give misinformation to computers. Computers are literal-minded and stupid; electronic records aren’t really records…so it is good to be alert to opportunities to foul up the system.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“thus young Daniel Shipstone saw at once that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension. Those who spoke of “energy scarcity” and of “conserving energy” simply did not understand the situation. The sky was “raining soup”; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday