Robert Anson Heinlein Zitate

seite 17

„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.)“

“Women seem to have almost unlimited capacity for forgiveness.”

“Rod…were you born that stupid? Or did you have to study?”

“One time in a hundred a gun might save your life; the other ninety-nine it will just tempt you into folly.”

“When a cat greets you, he makes a big operation of it, bumping, stropping your legs, buzzing like mischief. But when he leaves, he just walks off and never looks back. Cats are smart.”

“Fact is, you work too hard…the universe won’t run down if you don’t wind it.”

“I do not like weapons, Doctor; they are the last resort of faulty diplomacy.”

“If you can’t outargue the other fellow, sometimes you can outlive him.”

“Funny sort of science! I guess they were pretty ignorant in those days.”

“Earth, seen from space, looked as it had looked in color-stereo pictures, but he found that the real thing is as vastly more satisfying as a hamburger is better than a picture of one.”

“What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a spot of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string star. But sometimes they finish in style.”

“To be sure, some humans were always doing silly things—but at what point had prime damfoolishness become commonplace? When for example, had the zombie-like professional models become accepted ideals of American womanhood?”

“Apparently she believes she is safe. Evil is essentially stupid, Joe; despite her brilliance, she believes what she wishes to believe. Or it may be that she is willing to risk her own death against the tempting prize of absolute power.”

“Don’t say that I don’t mix with the common people, Joe; I sell used ’copters for a living. You can’t get any commoner. And don’t imply that my heart is not with them. We are not like them, but we are tied to them by the strongest bond of all, for we are all, each every one, sickening with the same certainly fatal disease—we are alive.”

“A totalitarian political religion is incompatible with free investigation.”

“Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men. The little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more attractively. There is no way to offer color to a colorblind man, nor is there any way for us to give the man of imperfect brain the canny skill to distinguish a lie from a truth.”

“For a hundred and fifty years or so democracy, or something like it, could flourish safely. The issues were such as to be settled without disaster by votes of common men, befogged and ignorant as they were. But now, if the race is simply to stay alive, political decisions depend on real knowledge of such things as nuclear physics, planetary ecology, genetic theory, even system mechanics. They aren’t up to it, Joe. With goodness and more will than they possess less than one in a thousand could stay awake over one page of nuclear physics; they can’t learn what they must know.”

“He had the high degree of courage so common in the human race, a race capable of conceiving death, yet able to face its probability daily, on the highway, on the obstetrics table, on the battlefield, in the air, in the subway—and to face lightheartedly the certainty of death in the end.”

“For vice has this defect; it cannot be truly intelligent. Its very motives are its weakness.”

“And all over the country the antagonists of human liberty, of human dignity—the racketeers, the crooked political figures, the shysters, the dealers in phony religions, the sweat-shoppers, the petty authoritarians, all of the key figures among the traffickers in human misery and human oppression, themselves somewhat adept in the arts of the mind and acutely aware of the danger of free knowledge—all of this unholy breed stirred uneasily and wondered what was taking place.”

“Cold calculated awareness that their power lay in keeping the people in ignorance.”

“In the first place there isn’t a distinguished anthropologist in the world but what you’ll find one equally distinguished who will call him a diamond-studded liar. They can’t agree on the simplest elements of their alleged science.”

“When I was a young student, I thought modern psychology could tell me the answers, but I soon found out that the best psychologists didn’t know a damn thing about the real core of the matter. Oh, I am not disparaging the work that has been done; it was badly needed and had been very useful in its way. None of ’em know what life is, what thought is, whether free will is a reality or an illusion, or whether that last question means anything. The best of ’em admit their ignorance; the worst of them make dogmatic assertions that are obvious absurdities.”

“He thought of a way to state it: Ego is the point of consciousness, the latest term in a continuously expanding series along the line of memory duration. That sounded like a general statement, but he was not sure; he would have to try to formulate it mathematically before he could trust it. Verbal language had such queer booby traps in it.”

“In Wilson’s scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality.”

“Bob Wilson admitted to himself that a Ph. D. and an appointment as an instructor was not his idea of existence. Still, it beat working for a living.”

“Narby had no particular respect for engineers, largely because he had no particular talent for engineering.”

“I think that’s unfair, Doctor. You certainly don’t expect a man to believe in things that run contrary to his good sense without offering him any reasonable explanation.”

“Imperialism degrades both oppressor and oppressed.”

“It is very difficult to tuck a bugle call back into a bugle. Pandora’s Box is a one-way proposition. You can turn a pig into sausage, but not sausage into pig. Broken eggs stay broken.”