Robert A. Heinlein on Time

"A half hour later I had a headache and a plan, but it called for an accomplice. The plan, I mean. The headache I could manage alone."

"Friday, don't despise assassins indiscriminately. As with any tool, merit or demerit lies in how it is used."

"If you can’t outargue the other fellow, sometimes you can outlive him."

"There is nothing in this world so permanent as a temporary emergency."

"Take sides! Always take sides! You will sometimes be wrong — but the man who refuses to take sides must always be wrong."

"Shaving, the common cold, and taxes...my old man says those are the three eternal problems the race is never going to lick."

"It seemed to John that most of the older people in the world spent much of their time not listening."

"Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow."

"Oh Max, you large lout, you arouse the eternal maternal in me."

"For three hundred years the race had glazed windows. Then they shut themselves up in little air-conditioned boxes and stared at silly television pictures instead. One might as well be on Luna."

"What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a spot of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string star. But sometimes they finish in style."

"This is the great day. This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race, up to this time. That is — today is New Year's Day of the Year One. If we don't change the calendar, historians will do so. The human race — this is our change, our puberty rite, bar mitzvah, confirmation, from the change of our infancy into adulthood for the human race. And we're going to go on out, not only to the Moon, to the stars; we're going to spread. I don't know that the United States is going to do it; I hope so. I have — I'm an American myself; I want it to be done by us. But in any case, the human race is going to do it, it's utterly inevitable: we're going to spread through the entire universe."

"All humans are created unequal. You are bigger and stronger than Pop; I am bigger and stronger than Hilda. I have the least years of experience; Pop has the most. Pop is a super-genius...but he concentrates so hard that he forgets to eat...unless he has a nursemaid to watch him—as Mama did, as I did, as Hilda now does. You, sir, are the all-around most competent man I’ve ever met, whether driving a duo, or dancing, or telling outrageous tales. Three of us have eight or nine earned degrees...but Aunt Hilda with none is a walking encyclopedia from insatiable curiosity and extraordinary memory. We two are baby factories and you two are not—but two men can impregnate fifty women—or five hundred. There is no end to the ways that we four are unequal."

"The future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands...with tools...with horse sense and science and engineering."

"There is no science of sociology. Perhaps there will be, some day, when a rigorous physics gives a finished science of colloidal chemistry and that leads in turn to a complete knowledge of biology, and from there to a definitive psychology. After that we may begin to know something about sociology and politics. Sometime around the year 5000 A.D., maybe—if the human race does not commit suicide before then."

"“But what you’re talking about means giving up all that—just the noble primitive, simple and self-sufficient. He’s going to chop down a tree—who sold him the ax? He wants to shoot a deer—who made his gun?...There never was and there never could be a noble simple creature such as you described. He’d be an ignorant savage, with dirt on his skin and lice in his hair. He would work sixteen hours a day to stay alive at all. He’d sleep in a filthy hut on a dirt floor. And his point of view and his mental processes would be just two jumps above an animal."

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit."