1,085 Quotes by Robert A. Heinlein

Most gods have the morals of a spoiled child.

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

I have never been able to see life as anything but a vast complicated practical joke, and it's better to laugh than cry.

Finish what you start. Keep submitting until it sells.

If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. It has long been known that one horse can run faster than another - but which one? Differences are crucial.

He should have known better because, early in his learnings under his brother Mahmoud, he had discovered that long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings, but short words were slippery, unpredictable changing their meanings without any pattern. Or so he seemed to grok. Short human words were never like a short Martian word - such as grok which forever meant exactly the same thing. Short human words were like trying to lift water with a knife. And this had been a very short word.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.

Men are not potatoes!

English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it.