Friday Quotes

“A credit card is a leash around your neck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy…”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Fortunately for all of us you did not stay dead.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Don’t grunt; it is not pleasing in a young woman.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“People are so used to the computer net today that it is easy to forget what a window to the world it can be—and I include myself. One can grow so canalized in using a terminal only in certain ways—paying bills, making telephonic calls, listening to news bulletins—that one can neglect its richer uses. If a subscriber is willing to pay for the service, almost anything can be done at a terminal that can be done out of bed.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“and when you’re home, what’s wrong with skin? Or as near as local custom permits.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“When I was younger, I thought I could change this world. Now I no longer think so but for emotional reasons I must keep on fighting a holding action.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Electrons don’t care. Once data of any sort go into the net, time is frozen. All that is necessary is to remember that all the endless riches of the past are available any time you punch for them.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“A credit card is a leash around your neck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy…”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“all public employees have larceny in their hearts or they wouldn’t be feeding at the public trough”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Do You Have a PROBLEM? Nothing is illegal—it isn’t what you do; it’s the way that you do it.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“I was brought up to bathe regularly and to believe that There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch; I”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“I could not live at home until it was all paid because I had to keep my job to meet those monthly payments. For what, then? Not for sex. As I told Captain Torrney, sex is everywhere; it’s silly to pay for it. For the privilege of getting my hands into soapy dishwater, I guess. For the privilege of rolling around on the floor and being peed on by puppies and babies only nominally housebroken.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“I haven’t been in the slightest danger. Just lost. And now I’m found.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Boss, you’re nitpicking to avoid admitting that it was your fault, not mine.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“The notices of change of address and of call code had gone out earlier but it was not until we were here and our comm center reestablished that I was notified that you had not made routine acknowledgment.” “For the bloody good reason that I did not receive routine notice!”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Oh, my God!” “Compose yourself.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“All normal human beings have soi-disant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts; those who know this and those who do not.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Only enough to protect the organization. Friday, you are well aware that the absence of Eyes and Ears today simply means that they are concealed. Be assured that I am shameless about protecting the organization.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“curled up and indulged in that worst of vices, self-pity, doing it thoroughly, with plenty of tears. I don’t see anything wrong with crying; it lubricates the psyche.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Spanish is so musical that a soap powder commercial in Spanish is more pleasing to the ear than the best free verse in English—the Spanish language is so beautiful that much of its poetry sounds best if the listener does not understand the meaning.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“a con man never stops being a con man; he can’t.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“The Society for Creative Euthanasia”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“Any human organization can be rendered useless, impotent, a danger to itself, by selectively removing its best minds while carefully leaving the stupid ones in place.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“When are the territorial states going to learn that they cannot possibly win against corporate states?”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

“No, not exactly. Damn it, why couldn’t she have married a white man? We brought her up better than that.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday