A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.

Robert Heinlein

Obscurity is the refuge of the incompetent.

Robert Heinlein

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

Robert A Heinlein, The green hills of Earth

Children seldom are able to realize that death will come to them personally. One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die … and accepts his sentence undismayed.

Robert A Heinlein, The moon is a harsh mistress

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

Robert A Heinlein, The moon is a harsh mistress

A managed democracy is a wonderful thing… for the managers… and its greatest strength is a ‘free press’ when ‘free’ is defined as ‘responsible’ and the managers define what is ‘irresponsible’.

Robert A Heinlein, The moon is a harsh mistress

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.

Robert A Heinlein, The moon is a harsh mistress

I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

Robert A Heinlein, The moon is a harsh mistress

The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.

Robert A Heinlein

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

Robert A Heinlein

Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.

Robert A Heinlein

In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.

Robert A Heinlein

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.

Robert A Heinlein

Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other ‘sins’ are invented nonsense.

Robert A Heinlein

Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, «This you may not read, this you must not know,» the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

Robert A Heinlein

An honest politician is one that stays bought.

Robert A Heinlein, Sixth Column

Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

Robert A Heinlein

Still rarer is the man who thinks habitually, who applies reason, rather than habit pattern, to all his activity. Unless he masques himself, his is a dangerous life; he is regarded as queer, untrustworthy, subversive of public morals; he is a pink monkey among brown monkeys — a fatal mistake. Unless the pink monkey can dye himself brown before he is caught.

The brown monkey’s instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.

Rarest of all is the man who can and does reason at all times, quickly, accurately, inclusively, despite hope or fear or bodily distress, without egocentric bias or thalmic disturbance, with correct memory, with clear distinction between fact, assumption, and non-fact.

Robert A Heinlein

A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain

Robert A Heinlein

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,

butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet,

balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying,

take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,

solve equations, analyze a new problem,

pitch manure, program a computer,

cook a tasty meal,

fight efficiently,

die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

Robert A Heinlein, Time Enough for Love