Robert A. Heinlein

“Then you believe in an afterlife?”

“Slow up! I don’t ‘believe’ in anything. I know certain things — little things, not the Nine Billion Names of God — from experience. But I have no beliefs. Belief gets in the way of learning.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

Age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into arrogant conceit. Its only advantage, so far as I have been able to see, is that it spans change. A young person sees the world as a still picture, immutable. An old person has had his nose rubbed in changes and more changes and still more changes so many times that he knows it is a moving picture, forever changing. He may not like it — probably doesn’t; I don’t — but he knows it’s so, and knowing it is the first step in coping with it.

Don’t ask me why. It was Navy policy and therefore did not have a reason.

Privacy is as necessary as company; you can drive a man crazy by depriving him of either.

If there is a purpose in life more important than two people cooperating in making a baby, all the philosophers in history haven’t been able to find it.

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Llita was well above average smart but suffered from the democratic fallacy: the notion that her opinion was as good as anyone’s — while Joe suffered from the aristocratic fallacy: He accepted the notion of authority in opinion.

Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors — and miss.

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.

Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying.