Robert A. Heinlein on Life

"May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live."

"I found out a long time ago that you have to take some chances in this life. Otherwise you are just a vegetable, headed for the soup pot."

"Some people insist that 'mediocre' is better than 'best.' They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can't fly. They despise brains because they have none."

"“Mooncraft isn’t a game; it’s the real thing. ‘Did you stay alive?’ If you make a mistake, you flunk—and they bury you."

"From my point of view it is better to be alive and young again, and broke, than it is to be the richest corpse in Forest Lawn."

"I learned before you were born that when someone wants to see me in a hurry, the urgency is almost never mutual."

"He was still having trouble readjusting. Wars were something you studied, not something that actually happened."

"Protoplasm is protean; any simple protoplasm can become any complex form of life under mutation and selection."

"One time in a hundred a gun might save your life; the other ninety-nine it will just tempt you into folly."

"But as grandpop always said, there are just three ways to get ahead; sweat and genius, getting born into the right family, or marrying into it."

"Bob Wilson admitted to himself that a Ph.D. and an appointment as an instructor was not his idea of existence. Still, it beat working for a living."

"There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know. So why fret about it?"

"The tragedy about Romeo and Juliet is not that they died so young but that the boy-meets-girl reflex should be so overpowering as to defeat all common sense."

"A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain."

"So-called instincts are instructive, Felix. They point to survival values."

"“Die trying” is the proudest human thing."

"Rod...were you born that stupid? Or did you have to study?"

"Life is short, but the years are long."

"Don’t say that I don’t mix with the common people, Joe; I sell used ’copters for a living. You can’t get any commoner. And don’t imply that my heart is not with them. We are not like them, but we are tied to them by the strongest bond of all, for we are all, each every one, sickening with the same certainly fatal disease—we are alive."

"“You put me in mind of a case I ran into in the American West. A respected citizen shot a professional gunthrower in the back. When asked why he didn’t give the other chap a chance to draw, the survivor said, ‘Well, he’s dead and I’m alive and that’s how I wanted it to be.’ Jamie, if you use sportsmanship on a known scamp, you put yourself at a terrible disadvantage."

"Just now I’m writing a series of oh-so-respectful articles about the private life of the Prophet and his acolytes and attending priests, how many servants they have, how much it costs to run the Palace, all about the fancy ceremonies and rituals, and such junk. All of it perfectly true, of course, and told with unctuous approval. But I lay it on a shade too thick. The emphasis is on the jewels and the solid gold trappings and how much it all costs, and I keep telling the yokels what a privilege it is for them to be permitted to pay for such frippery and how flattered they should feel that God’s representative on earth lets them take care of him."

"As I once heard Andrew—that’s my disappearing brother—say: ‘Life consist in accommodating oneself to the Universe.’ Although the rest of our family has never taken that view. We believe if forcing the Universe to accommodate itself to us. It’s all a question of which one is to be master."

"Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive. The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to the extent of the food supply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life—the ragged edge of starvation."

"“We see the history of the world as a series of crises in a conflict between two opposing philosophies. Ours is based on the notion that life, consciousness, intelligence, ego is the important thing in the world.”...“That puts us in conflict with every force that tends to destroy, deaden, degrade the human spirit, or to make it act contrary to its nature."

"Well, in the first place an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization. That’s a personal evaluation only. But gunfighting has a strong biological use. We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days. But to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both. It’s a good thing."

"When I was a young student, I thought modern psychology could tell me the answers, but I soon found out that the best psychologists didn’t know a damn thing about the real core of the matter. Oh, I am not disparaging the work that has been done; it was badly needed and had been very useful in its way. None of ’em know what life is, what thought is, whether free will is a reality or an illusion, or whether that last question means anything. The best of ’em admit their ignorance; the worst of them make dogmatic assertions that are obvious absurdities."