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Robert A. Heinlein on Easter

1907–1988 United States

← All quotes by Robert A. Heinlein

6 quotes

Magic is not science, it is a collection of ways to do things — ways that work but often we don't know why.

Glory Road (1963)

I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith — it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.

Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

One man's "magic" is another man's engineering. "Supernatural" is a null word.

Time Enough for Love (1973)

I would be disappointed if everything I saw turned out to be something Western Electric will build once Bell Labs works the bugs out. There ought to be some magic, somewhere, just for flavor.

Glory Road (1963)

Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it — especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.

There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that’s philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to see a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that’s science. Three: Awareness that you live in a malevolent universe controlled by Murphy’s Law, sometimes offset in part by Brewster’s Factor: that’s engineering.

The Number of the Beast (1980)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Robert A. Heinlein (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.