1,085 Quotes by Robert A. Heinlein

My folks tried to make a preacher of me and missed by a narrow margin… I would have made a good one if I hadn’t fallen into the fatal folly of reading anything I could lay hands on. With just a touch more self confidence and a liberal helping of ignorance I could have been a famous evangelist.

It was equally imperative that this chain of reactions should always tend to dampen, to die out. It must not build up, or the uranium mass would explode within a time interval too short to be measured by any means whatsoever. Nor would there be anyone left to measure it.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

When one teaches, two learn.

Specialization is for insects.

The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.

There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

Morals — all correct moral laws — derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.