The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally.
Interpretation
Conspiracies are self-destructive and ultimately undermine themselves from within.
This quote reflects the idea that conspiracies, while often appearing to be stable or effective on the surface, contain inherent flaws and contradictions that lead to their downfall. The internal conflicts and ethical dilemmas arising from such schemes ultimately corrupt their foundation, causing them to collapse under their own weight.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about ethics in political strategies.
The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
An armed society is a polite society.
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.
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.
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
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.
I would by all means have men beware, lest Γsop's pretty fable of the fly that sate [sic] on the pole of a chariot at the Olympic races and said, 'What a dust do I raise,' be verified in them. For so it is that some small observation, and that disturbed sometimes by the instrument, sometimes by the eye, sometimes by the calculation, and which may be owing to some real change in the heaven, raises new heavens and new spheres and circles.
The future is uncertain but the end is always near.
Seeing the similarity to oneself, one should not use violence or have it used.
Suppose we concede that if I had been born of Muslim parents in Morocco rather than Christian parents in Michigan, my beliefs would be quite different. [But] the same goes for the pluralist...If the pluralist had been born in [Morocco] he probably wouldn't be a pluralist. Does it follow that...his pluralist beliefs are produced in him by an unreliable belief-producing process?
I realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things. Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe.
Who hasn't sharpened the edge of his soul? When, just as our eyes are opened, we see hate, and just after learning to walk, we are tripped, and just for wanting to love, we are hated, and for no more than touching, we are hurt, which of us hasn't started to arm himself, to make himself sharp, somehow, like a knife, to pay back the hurt?
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