Robert A. Heinlein · 56 pages
Rating: (3.3K votes)
“Darling, a true lady takes off her dignity with her clothes and does her whorish best. At other times you can be as modest and dignified as your persona requires.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
“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.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
“Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure “good” government, it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things, but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the “backseat driver” syndrome.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
“Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
“Avoid making irrevocable decisions while tired or hungry.
N.B.: Circumstances can force your hand. So think ahead!”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
“I’m more happy than not.
Don’t forget me.”
― Adam Silvera, quote from More Happy Than Not
“I guess we all make choices as to how we want to live, right?”
― Chris Ware, quote from Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth
“It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist=s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.
This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.
Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one.
For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.
By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry.
Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Sourcery
“Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.”
― Sigmund Freud, quote from The Future of an Illusion
“He doesn't teach you what to think, he teaches you how to think”
― Lurlene McDaniel, quote from Don't Die, My Love
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