Robert A. Heinlein

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them.

The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally.

The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with those three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire his courage but not his judgement.

If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people. -- Lazarus Long.

Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good." He wished that government would wander off and get lost! (96)

Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe---in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.

No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain.

If you've got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn't prove it.

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

His was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.

My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.

Straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in law schools.

Thinking doesn't pay. Just makes you discontented with what you see around you.

Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?

Money problems can always be solved by a man not frightened by them.

A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.

To permit irresponsible authority is to sell disaster.

Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.

Civilians are like beans; you buy 'em as needed for any job which merely requires skill and savvy. But you can't buy fighting spirit.