Robert A. Heinlein

I spent my boyhood the way every boy does — trying to keep my elders from finding out what I was up to.

That was encouraging; a person who can read and write and has a head for math can learn anything she needs to know.

"No man is an island — " Much as we may feel and act as Individuals, our race is —a single organism, always growing and branching —which must be pruned regularly to be healthy.

This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth.

Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods —killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of "He's dead and I'm alive and that's the way I wanted it to be."

But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right.

But I don't have to like it —and I don't.

‘Put not your faith in princes,’ Ira; since they don’t produce, they always steal.

There’s no virtue in being old, it just takes a long time.

It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.

May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.

Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect.

“I'm still learning English. By the naturalistic method the way a child learns his milk language. No grammar, no syntax, no dictionary — just listen and talk and read it. Acquire new words by context. By that method I acquired a feeling that ‘love' means the shared ecstasy that can be attained through sex. Is that right?”

“Son, I hate to say this — because, if you've been reading a lot of English, I see how you reached that opinion — but you are one hundred percent wrong.”

They did ask, sometimes, and accepted my decision without argument. But I could see that they did not always believe me. That pleased me; they were starting to think for themselves — didn’t matter if they were wrong.

One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.

If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.