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Quotes from Friday — Robert A. Heinlein

1907–1988 United States

← All quotes by Robert A. Heinlein

20 quotes

It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can’t be enforced weakens all other laws.

Friday (1982)

I suspect that there are just two sorts of lawyers: those who spend their efforts making life easy for other people—and parasites.

Friday (1982)

Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.

Friday (1982)

Stupid fools look just as good as military geniuses until the fighting starts.

Friday (1982)

People who are busy and happy don’t write diaries; they are too busy living.

Friday (1982)

Marriages are arranged in heaven but the bills must be paid here on earth.

Friday (1982)

You’re not a stranger; you’re an old friend we haven’t known very long.

Friday (1982)

Self-pity, he said, is the most demoralizing of all vices.

Friday (1982)

“Religious” = “absolute belief without proof.”

Friday (1982)

Don’t kid yourself, Friday; knowing too much is a capital offense. In politics it always has been.

Friday (1982)

All normal human beings have soi-disant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts; those who know this and those who do not.

Friday (1982)

But I do not willingly involve us in nationalistic wars; the side of the angels is seldom self-evident.

Friday (1982)

Friday, don’t despise assassins indiscriminately. As with any tool, merit or demerit lies in how it is used.

Friday (1982)

I had learned lately that wanting something and being able to pay for it were not the same.

Friday (1982)

“Georges, I don’t know much about California politics—”
“My dear, no one knows much about California politics, including California politicians.”

Friday (1982)

I had hit him in his male pride.
Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.

Friday (1982)

Friday, brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value. Any human organization can be rendered useless, impotent, a danger to itself, by selectively removing its best minds while carefully leaving the stupid ones in place.

Friday (1982)

My mistake. My inexcusable mistake, as a con man never stops being a con man; he can’t. But I suffered from a will to believe, a defect of character that I thought I had rooted out. I was mistaken.

Friday (1982)

It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn’t the whole population.

Friday (1982)

Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named...but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

Friday (1982)

Attribution

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