Robert A. Heinlein

I have never been able to see life as anything but a vast complicated practical joke, and it’s better to laugh than cry.

Oratory is a null program.

In writing your constitution let me invite attention to the wonderful virtue of the negative! Accentuate the negative! Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do. No conscript armies... no interference however slight with freedom of press, or speech, or travel, or assembly, or of religion, or of instruction, or communication, or occupation... no involuntary taxation.

But I was born free.

Excuse me, I did not mean to criticize your planet.

At one time kings were anointed by Deity, so the problem was to see to it that Deity chose the right candidate. In this age the myth is "the will of the people" ... but the problem changes only superficially.

Progress doesn't come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.

Women are scarce; aren't enough to go around — that makes them most valuable thing in Luna, more precious than ice or air, as men without women don't care whether they stay alive or not.

Fighting continued on a token basis, and the dead did not complain.

Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden.

What we think of as ‘Physical beauty’ is almost certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness—intelligence—among them.

It’s impossible for a woman to lay it on too thick with a man. If you tell a man he’s eight feet tall and say it often enough, with your eyes wide and a throb in your voice, he’ll start stooping to go through seven-foot doors.