Robert A. Heinlein on Justice

"Old age is not an accomplishment; it is just something that happens to you despite yourself, like falling downstairs."

"My old man claimed that the more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels."

"Clark just looked bored and contemptuous and said nothing, because Clark would not bother to interfere with Armageddon unless there was ten percent in it for him."

"I called after him but he just kept going. Clark is not hard of hearing but he can be very hard of listening."

"Oh, we get along. She lets me have my own way, and later I find out I’ve done just what she wanted me to do."

"You have to believe evidence when you have it in front of you, or else the universe is just too fantastic."

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

"Convinced of their destiny to rule, they convinced themselves that the end justified the means."

"Premenstrual Syndrome: Just before their periods women behave the way men do all the time."

"Doc says the Company set-up is just one big happy family, and the idea that it is a non-profit corporation is the biggest joke since women were invented."

"Every law that was ever written opened up a new way to graft."

"When a cat greets you, he makes a big operation of it, bumping, stropping your legs, buzzing like mischief. But when he leaves, he just walks off and never looks back. Cats are smart."

"The law is whatever you can convince a court it is."

"I was too busy to oblige them by dying just now."

"Nobody ever wins a lawsuit but the lawyers."

"“Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist’s view, ’justice’ is a search for workable customs."

"“Johnnie, the nice thing about citing God as an authority is that you can prove anything you set out to prove. It’s just a matter of selecting the proper postulates, then insisting that your postulates are ‘inspired.’ Then no one can possibly prove that you are wrong."

"We don’t have to be convincing—not in the sense of getting converts. Real converts might prove to be a nuisance. We just have to be convincing enough to look like a legitimate religion to our overlords. And that doesn’t have to be very convincing. All religions look equally silly from the outside."

"The point is, your request for a lawyer comes about two hundred years too late to be meaningful. The verbalisms lag behind the facts. Nevertheless, you shall have a lawyer—or a lollipop, whichever you prefer, after I am through questioning you. If I were you, I’d take the lollipop. More nourishing."

"By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget—especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself—that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen."

"Mass psychology is not simply a summation of individual psychologies; that is a prime theorem of social psychodynamics—not just my opinion; no exception has ever been found to this theorem. It is the social mass-action rule, the mob-hysteria law, known and used by military, political, and religious leaders, by advertising men and prophets and propagandists, by rabble rousers and actors and gang leaders, for generations before it was formulated in mathematical symbols. It works."