Heinlein on life

I have taught science fiction and enjoy its flights of fancy. One of the premier sf writers was Robert Heinlein. He is considered one of the top two or three authors due to his fertile imagination, his intelligence, and his maverick themes. Check out some of his statements I have collected here. You can see the sparkle and wit. Let me know if you'd like a list of some of his best tales.


You live and learn. Or you don't live long.

Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.

A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.

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

Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.

Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss.

Don't ever become a pessimist... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.

Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.

For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

I never learned from a man who agreed with me.

It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.

"Love" is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy.

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

Never insult anyone by accident.


Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.

No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.

One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.

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

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

They didn't want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.

To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.