From Robert A. Heinlein
"I am an artist, albeit a minor one. Admittedly most of my stuff is fit to read only once…and not even once for a busy person, who already knows the little I have to say. But I am an honest artist, because what I write is consciously intended to reach the customer…reach him and affect him, if possible with pity and terror…or, if not, at least to divert the tedium of his hours with a chuckle or an odd idea. But I am never trying to hide it from him in a private language, nor am I seeking the praise of other writers for ‘technique’ or other balderdash. ...Damn it, you punched one of my buttons." – Harshaw
"If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshipped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbably but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then, (stipulating affirmatively both of the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by ...[what] some religions offered him as ‘worship.’"
"There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harrass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself."
"By the Martian map, you cannot possibly hate anything unless you grok it completely, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you – then and only then can you hate it. By hating yourself. But this also implies, by necessity, that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise." – Mike
"[Mike] grokked that eternity and the ever-beautifully-changing-now were identical."
"Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit. The Bible Belt faith I was brought up in encouraged mindless, conceited self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us and us alone, and what hell everyone else was going to catch come Judgement Day..." – Harshaw
"I do not propose to let my social and mental inferiors tell me where I have to go on Sundays – and I wouldn’t enjoy Heaven if that crowd is going to be there. I simply object to your criticizing them for the wrong reasons. As literature, the New Revelation stacks up about average – it should; it was composed by plagarizing other scriptures. As for logic and internal consistency, these mundane rules do not apply to sacred writings and never have – but even on these grounds the New Revelation must be rated superior; it hardly ever bites its own tail. Try reconciling the Old Testament with the New Testament sometime, or Buddhist doctrine with Buddhist apocrypha. As morals, Fosterism is merely the Freudian ethic sugar-coated for people who can’t take their psychology straight, although I doubt if the old lecher who wrote it – pardon me, was ‘inspired to write it’ – was aware of this. He was no scholar. But he was in tune with his times..." – Harshaw
"All right! God wants us to be happy and he told us how: ‘Love one another!’ Love a snake if the poor thing needs love. And by ‘love’ He didn’t mean namby-pamby old-maid-aunt love that’s scared to look up from a hymn book for fear of seeing a temptation of the flesh. If God hated flesh, why did he make so much of it? God is no sissy. He made the Grand Canyon and comets coursing through the sky and cyclones and stallions and earthquakes – can a God who can do all that turn around and practically wet his pants just because some little sheila leans over a mite and a man catches sight of a tit? You know better, hon – and so do I! When God told us to love, he wasn’t holding out a card on us; He meant it. Love little babies that always need changing and love big, smelly men so that there will be more little babies to love – and in between go on loving because it’s so good to love!" – Patty
"I had thought – I had been told – that ‘funny’ is a thing of goodness. It isn’t. Not ever is it funny to the person it happens to. The goodness is in laughing itself. I grok it is a bravery…and a sharing…against pain and sorrow and defeat. All those religions – they contradict each other on every other point but every one of them is filled with ways to help people be brave enough to laugh even though they know they are dying." – Mike
"We’re not trying to bring people to God; that’s a contradiction in terms, you can’t even say it in Martian. We’re not trying to save souls, because souls can’t be lost. We’re not trying to get people to have faith, because what we offer is not faith but truth – truth they can check; we don’t urge them to believe it. Truth for practical purposes, for here-and-now, truth as matter-of-fact as an ironing board and as useful as a loaf of bread…so practical it can make war and violence and hate unnecessary..." – Mike
"Mike grinned with unashamed cheerfulness. ‘I am God. Thou art God…and any jerk I remove is God, too. Jubal, it is said that God notes each sparrow that falls. And so He does. But the proper closest statement of it that can be made in English is that God cannot avoid noting the sparrow because the sparrow is God. And when a cat stalks a sparrow both of them are God, carrying out God’s thoughts.’"
"’Thou art God.’ It’s not a message of cheer and hope, Jubal. It’s a defiance – and an unafraid unabashed assumption of personal responsibility.’ He looked sad. ‘But I rarely put it over. A very few, so far just these few here with us today, our brothers, understood me and accepted the bitter half along with the sweet, stood up and drank it – grokked it. The others, the hundreds and thousands of others, either insisted on treating it as a prize without contest – a ‘conversion’…or ignored it entirely. No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside of themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own…and that all the trouble they are in is of their own doing…is one that they can’t or won’t entertain." – Mike
"Every impossible rule has its loopholes; every general prohibition creates its bootleggers. The Navy as a whole created its impossible rules; the Navy as individuals violated them, especially its curious rules about sex – a publicly monastic life on duty, a slightly veiled life of unlimited voluptuousness off duty. But this Navy was only a little more hypocritical in its sexual behavior than was the social matrix in which it was embedded, more excessive in its outlets only to the degree that its public rules were more sternly impossible than those of the society as a whole. The public sexual code of that time [the 20th century] was unbelievable, Ira; the violations of it simply mirrored in reverse its fantastic requirements." – LL
"I was a schoolteacher once – lost that job when they taught me teaching kids the raw truth, a capital offense anywhere in the Galaxy.” – LL
"A pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun – and neither can stop the march of events.” – LL
"Any sexual act is moral or immoral by precisely the same laws of morality as any other human act; all other rules about sex are simply customs – local and transient. There are more codes of sexual conduct than a dog has fleas – and all they have in common is that they are ‘ordained by God.’ I wish God would quit changing his mind." – LL
"Dora and I had the same ideas about raising kids. Praise them, never scream at them, punish them asnecessary and right now – never a moment’s delay – then it’s over with and forget it. Be as lavish with affection after a spanking as at any other time – or a bit extra." – LL
"’Dear Twins and Family,
Surprise! Meet Corporal Ted Bronson, acting sergeant and the meanest drillmaster in the whole National Army of the United States. No, I have not scrambled my circuits. I temporarily lost track of a basic principle of evasive action, i.e., the best place to hide a needle is in a stack of needles…and the best place to avoid the horrors of war is in an army. Since none of you has ever seen a war, or even an Army, I must explain.
I had (foolishly) planned to avoid this war by running away to South America. But South America is a place where I could not possibly pass for a native, no matter how well I spoke the language – and it is loaded with German agents who would suspect me of being an American agent and might arrange some nasty accident for Ol’ Buddy Boy, bless his innocent heart. And the girls there have beautiful flashing eyes, suspicious duennas, and fathers who love to shoot gringos up to no good. Unhealthy.
But if I stayed in the United States and tried to stay out of the Army – one slip and I wind up behind cold stone walls, eating miserable food, and making little rocks out of big ones. Unappealing.
But in wartime the Army gets the best of everything – aside from a mild hazard of getting shot at. The latter can be avoided.
How? This is not yet the era of total war, and an Army offers innumerable bolt holes for a coward (me) to avoid unpleasant dangers from strangers. In this era only a small part of an Army gets shot at…” – LL, Delay Mail letter to present family who remain 2400 years in the future
"All ‘nows’ are equal; that is the basic theorem of time travel. They don’t disappear; both ‘past’ and ‘future’ are mathematical abstractions; the ‘now’ is always all there is." – LL
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