1,085 Quotes by Robert A. Heinlein

If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you’ll abort it if you do. Be patient and you’ll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.

Nobody has ever seen an electron. Nor a thought. You can’t see a thought, you can’t measure, weigh, nor taste it- but thoughts are the most real things in the Galaxy.

Don’t ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun – and neither can stop the march of events.

A boy who gets a C- in ‘Appreciation of Television’ can’t be all bad.

They didn’t want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.

An animal so poor in spirit that he won’t even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.

I know why we laugh. We laugh because it hurts, and it’s the only thing to make it stop hurting.

It’s amazing how much ‘mature wisdom’ resembles being too tired.

Patriotism is not sentimental nonsense. Nor something dreamed up by demagogues. Patriotism is as necessary a part of man’s evolutionary equipment as are his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual.