Quotes By Author: Robert A. Heinlein

“The country and culture commonly known as “America” had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees—its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.”

“It’s up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don’t even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we ‘fail’ to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything–obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.”

“Death isn’t funny.” “Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.”

“The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.”

“The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for—if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.”

“People simplify ‘Apollonian’ into ‘mild’, and ‘calm’, and ‘cool’. But ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’ are two sides of one coin–a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox.”

“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.”

“Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.”

“Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.”

“Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness.”

“There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?”

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

“A desire not to butt into other people’s business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom.”

“Women talk when they want to. Or don’t.”

“That God is in truth the sort of bloodthirsty paranoid Who would rend to bits forty-two children for the crime of sassing one of his priests. Don’t ask me about the Front Office’s policies; I just work here.”