“I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats—I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“That was smart, that was engineering: never reinvent something that you can buy down the street.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“I was not in bad health (aside from a cumulative hangover), I was still on the right side of thirty by a few days, and I was far from being broke. No police were looking for me, nor any husbands, nor any process servers; there was nothing wrong that a slight case of amnesia would not have cured.
But there was winter in my heart and I was looking for the door to summer. If I sound like a man with an acute case of self-pity, you are correct. There must have been well over two billion people on this planet in worse shape than I was. Nevertheless, I was looking for the Door into Summer.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“I had taken a partner once before-but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“I am not sentimental about kids. Little monsters, most of them, who don’t civilize until they are grown and sometimes not then.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“You can die anyplace. They’ve never managed to regulate that.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account—the cops leave him alone.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“These people who deal in fancification to fool the public think nobody can read and write but themselves.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“There wasn’t any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous...fatal, in the end.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Angeles was safe from invasion; the invaders wouldn’t find a place to park—I”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“I wanted us to get out of production. Jake Schmidt, our production shop master, was a good man; nevertheless I was forever being jerked out of a warm creative fog to straighten out bugs in production—which is like being dumped out of a warm bed into ice water. This was the real reason why I had been doing so much nightwork and staying away from the shop in the daytime.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“joking. A slave needs privileges to keep him quiet.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“-Brindemos por la raza femenina, Pet… ¡Encuéntralas y olvídalas!”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“But I gathered that it was classified...by order of this Colonel, uh, Plushbottom.” “Thrushbotham. Thrushbotham, sir. A fat, fatuous, flatulent, foot-kissing fool incompetent to find his hat with it nailed to his head. Which it should have been.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Брать взаймы – всё равно что плыть с камнем на шее.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Мудрый человек должен быть в любое время готов остаться ни с чем.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Belle was not only a perfect secretary and office manager, she also had personal specs which would have delighted Praxiteles and a fragrance which affected me the way catnip does Pete.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
Robert A. Heinlein
Born place: in Butler, MO, The United States
Born date July 7, 1907
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“How can one talk about the economics of small independent countries? How can one discuss a problem that is a non-problem? There is no such thing as the viability of states or of nations, there is only a problem of viability of people: people, actual persons like you and me, are viable when they can stand on their own feet and earn their keep. You do not make nonviable people viable by putting large numbers of them into one huge community, and you do not make viable people non-viable by splitting a large community into a number of smaller, more intimate, more coherent and more manageable groups. All this is perfectly obvious and there is absolutely nothing to argue about. Some people ask: 'What happens when a country, composed of one rich province and several poor ones, falls apart because the rich province secedes?' Most probably the answer is: 'Nothing very much happens.' The rich will continue to be rich and the poor will continue to be poor. 'But if, before secession, the rich province had subsidised the poor, what happens then?' Well then, of course, the subsidy might stop. But the rich rarely subsidise the poor; more often they exploit them.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, quote from Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
“I'm so..." Heartsick. You took my insides and left me a little broken. ”
― Caroline Hanson, quote from Love Is Mortal
“The point of freewriting is to get past the voice inside your head that tells you your ideas aren't good enough, your words aren't good enough, you're no writer and so forth.”
― M. Molly Backes, quote from The Princesses of Iowa
“Nothing is what you imagine. Her mind hovered above this simple and alarming thought. The variables were too great, the particularities too distinct, life a flood of translations from the shadow-edged yearnings of the heart to the immutable aspects of the physical world.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from The Burgess Boys
“Too many rules about monogamy. So”
― Tracy Brogan, quote from Crazy Little Thing
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Keeper of the Lost C...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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