Robert Anson Heinlein Zitate

seite 11

„Glück besteht darin, genügend Schlaf zu bekommen. Nur das, nichts mehr.“

„Es gibt keine schlimmere Tyrannei, als jemanden zu zwingen, für etwas zu zahlen, das er nicht will, nur weil ihr glaubt, dass es gut für ihn wäre.“

„Frauen und Katzen werden tun, was sie wollen, und Männer und Hunde sollten sich entspannen und sich an die Idee gewöhnen.“

„Liebe ist der Zustand, in dem das Glück eines anderen Menschen für den eigenen wesentlich ist.“

„Handicapen Sie Ihre Kinder nicht, indem Sie ihnen das Leben leicht machen.“

„Eine Generation, die die Geschichte ignoriert, hat keine Vergangenheit - und keine Zukunft.“

„Hüte dich vor Selbstlosigkeit! Sie basiert auf Selbsttäuschung, der Quelle allen Übels.“

„Cheops' Gesetz: Nichts wird pünktlich oder ohne Erweiterung des Budgets fertig.“

„Ein Prüfstein zum Herausfinden des wirklichen Werts eines »Intellektuellen«: Finde heraus, was er von Astrologie hält.“

„Klima erwartet man, Wetter bekommt man.“

„Eine prüde Person ist eine Person, die denkt, dass ihre eigenen Anstandsregeln Naturgesetze sind.“

„Unterschätze niemals die Macht der menschlichen Dummheit.“

„Man kann Frieden haben. Oder man kann Freiheit haben. Rechne niemals damit, beide gleichzeitig zu haben.“

„Sünde liegt nur darin, andere Menschen unnötig zu verletzen. Alle anderen "Sünden" sind erfundener Blödsinn. (Sich selbst zu verletzen ist keine Sünde -- nur dumm.)“

“Widows are far better than brides. They don't tell, they won't yell, they don't swell, they rarely smell, and they're grateful as hell.”

““The Great Egg must love human beings, he made a lot of them.”
“Same argument applies to oysters, only more so.””

“The death rate is the same for us as for anybody … one person, one death, sooner or later.”

“His bow to me must have been calculated on a slide rule; it suggested that I was about to be Supreme Minister but was not quite there yet, that I was his senior but nevertheless a civilian — then subtract five degrees for the fact that he wore the Emperor’s aiguillette on his right shoulder.”

“They made the predictable fuss about taking a cat into a room and an autobellhop is not responsive to bribes—hardly an improvement. But the assistant manager had more flexibility in his synapses; He listened to reason as long as it was crisp and rustled.”

“Women seem to have almost unlimited capacity for forgiveness. (Since it is usually a man who needs forgiveness, this must be a racial survival trait.)”

“A man who bets on greed and dishonesty won’t be wrong too often.”

““Sharpie, you’ve got a one-track mind.”
“It’s the main track. Reproduction is the main track; the methods and mores of sexual copulation are the central feature of all higher developments of life.”
“You’re ignoring money and television.”
“Piffle! All human activities including scientific research are either mating dances and care of the young, or the dismal sublimations of born losers in the only game in town.””

“No philosopher allows his opinions to be swayed by facts—he would be kicked out of his guild. Theologians, the lot of them.”

““Peewee!” I said sharply. “You're not listening.”
“What were you doing talking,” she answered reasonably, “when I wasn’t listening?””

“I hadn’t learned much in high school; I had majored in girls.”

“Since when did a mathematician need any tools but his own head? Pythagoras had done well enough with a stick and a stretch of sand.”

“I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy…censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

“The answer to any question starting, "Why don't they—" is almost always, "Money."”

“The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.”

“I don’t believe in luck, Sam. Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius.”

“Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow.”

“Matt, you are suffering from a disease of youth—you expect moral problems to have nice, neat, black-and-white answers.”

“I carried out my purpose: War and Peace, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and so forth. Would you believe it? Something is gained in translation; the originals are even more depressing and soporific than translations. I’m not sure what purpose Russian fiction has, but it can’t be entertainment.”

“At fourteen months he began speaking in sentences, short and of his own structure, but sentences. The subjects of his conversation, or, rather, his statements, were consistently egocentric. Normal again—no one expects an infant to write essays on the beauties of altruism.”

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

“At that point I realized that I had been thinking in Russian. It’s a wonderful language for paranoid thoughts.”

“The best things in history are accomplished by people who get “tired of being shoved around.””

“A man who marries at my age isn’t taking a wife, he’s indenturing a nurse.”

“The truth of a proposition has little or nothing to do with its psychodynamics. The notion that ‘truth will prevail’ is merely a pious wish; history doesn’t show it.”

“I dictated my report; forty recruitments all okayed by the Psych Bureau — counting my own, which I knew would be okayed. I was here, wasn't I? Then I taped a request for assignment to operations; I was sick of recruiting.”

““If there was anything, anything more at all, after this crazy mix-up we call living, I could feel that there might be some point to the whole frantic business, even if I did not know and could not know the full answer while I was alive.”
“And suppose there was not? Suppose that when a man’s body disintegrates, he himself disappears absolutely. I’m bound to say I find it a probable hypothesis.”
“Well— It wouldn’t be cheerful knowledge, but it would be better than not knowing. You could plan your life rationally, at least. A man might even be able to get a certain amount of satisfaction in planning things better for the future, after he’s gone. A vicarious pleasure in the anticipation.””

““You know the answers, but just between ourselves, that sketch smells a bit. It’s sloppy.”
“I never did have any artistic talent,” Art said defensively. “I’d rather take a photograph any day.”
“You’ve taken too many photographs, maybe. As for artistic talent, I haven’t any either, but I learned to sketch. Look, Art—the rest of you guys get this, too—if you can’t sketch, you can’t see. If you really see what you’re looking at, you can put it down on paper, accurately. If you really remember what you have looked at, you can sketch it accurately from memory.”
“But the lines don’t go where I intend them to.”
“A pencil will go where you push it. It hasn’t any life of its own. The answer is practice and more practice and thinking about what you are looking at. All of you lugs want to be scientists. Well, the ability to sketch accurately is as necessary to a scientist as his slipstick. More necessary, you can get along without a slide rule.””

“Protoplasm is protean; any simple protoplasm can become any complex form of life under mutation and selection.”