The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. 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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True freedom comes from understanding one's own moral responsibility.
This quote emphasizes the idea that true freedom is rooted in the awareness of personal moral responsibility. The individual recognizes that no external rules or societal norms can dictate their actions if they possess the understanding that they are accountable for their choices, allowing them to act in accordance with their own values, whether that means complying with or challenging existing norms.
Themes
FreedomResponsibilityMoralityChoicesIndividualism
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about personal autonomy and ethics, one might use this quote to underline the importance of personal accountability.
More from Robert A. Heinlein
All quotes →An armed society is a polite society.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
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. HeinleinRead
Similar quotes
No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
Oscar WildeRead
It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.
James A. BaldwinRead
Compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.
Joan HalifaxRead
The essence of the religious emotions consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
Friedrich SchleiermacherRead
And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.
Mitch AlbomRead
I don't trust society to protect us, I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them.
Mario PuzoRead