Frases de Robert Anson Heinlein

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“Puedes tener paz. O puedes tener libertad. Nunca cuentes con tener ambos a la vez.”

“La felicidad consiste en dormir lo suficiente. Solo eso, nada más.”

“Un ser humano debe ser capaz de cambiar pañales, planear invasiones, carnear cerdos, navegar barcos, diseñar edificios, escribir sonetos, contabilizar saldos, levantar paredes, tratar fracturas, dar consuelo a moribundos, recibir órdenes, dar órdenes, cooperar, actuar solo, resolver ecuaciones, analizar nuevos problemas, palear estiércol, programar computadoras, cocinar bien, luchar eficientemente, morir con gallardía. La especialización es para los insectos.”

“Yo soy libre, al margen de las normas que me rodean. Si las encuentro soportables, las soporto; si me parecen detestables, las quebranto. Soy libre porque sé que soy moralmente responsable de todo lo que hago.”

“La democracia no puede funcionar. Matemáticos, campesinos, y animales, eso es todo lo que hay. Así que la democracia, una teoría basada en la asunción de que los matemáticos y los campesinos son iguales, nunca puede funcionar. La sabiduría no es aditiva; su máximo es el del hombre más sabio del grupo.”

“No le hagas la vida difícil a tus hijos haciéndosela fácil.”

“La noción de que cuando un hombre o una compañía han sacado un beneficio del público durante un cierto número de años, el gobierno y los tribunales tienen el deber de salvaguardar esos beneficios en el futuro, incluso […] contra el beneficio del público. […] Ni los individuos ni las corporaciones tienen el menor derecho de acudir a los tribunales y exigir que el reloj de la historia sea detenido, o retrasado, en beneficio particular suyo.”

“El pecado se encuentra solamente en querer herir a otras personas innecesariamente. Todos los demás pecados son disparatados inventos. El automaltrato no es un pecado… es simplemente estúpido.”

“La teología nunca ha sido de gran ayuda, es como buscar, a medianoche y en un sótano oscuro, a un gato negro que no está ahí.”

“Los diez mandamientos están hechos para cerebros aburridos. Los primeros cinco son exclusivamente para el beneficio de los curas y sus poderes; los segundos cinco son medias verdades, ni completas ni adecuadas.”

“Isaac Asimov gana dinero a costa de su neurosis”

“Oremos por un último aterrizaje
sobre el globo que nos vio nacer.
Fijemos nuestros ojos en el cielo aborregado
y las frescas, verdes colinas de la Tierra.”

“Brindemos por la raza femenina, Pet… ¡Encuéntralas y olvídalas!”

“Las mejores cosas de la vida están por encima del dinero; su precio es la angustia, el sudor y la dedicación, y el precio que exige la más preciosa de de todas las cosas es la vida misma, el costo definitivo para el valor perfecto”

“Hice un descubrimiento muy importante en el campamento Currie: la felicidad consiste en dormir suficiente.”

“Dije que "Patriotismo" es una forma de decir "Mujeres y niños primero". Y que nadie puede obligar a un hombre a sentirse así. En su lugar, debe abrazarlo libremente.”

“La violencia, la fuerza bruta, ha zanjado más asuntos en la historia de lo que lo ha hecho cualquier otro factor, y la opinión contraria es pensamiento voluntarista del peor.”

“Escuche siempre a los expertos. Le dirán lo que no puede hacerse y por qué. ¡Luego hágalo!!”

“Widows are far better than brides. They don't tell, they won't yell, they don't swell, they rarely smell, and they're grateful as hell.”

““The Great Egg must love human beings, he made a lot of them.”
“Same argument applies to oysters, only more so.””

“The death rate is the same for us as for anybody … one person, one death, sooner or later.”

“His bow to me must have been calculated on a slide rule; it suggested that I was about to be Supreme Minister but was not quite there yet, that I was his senior but nevertheless a civilian — then subtract five degrees for the fact that he wore the Emperor’s aiguillette on his right shoulder.”

“They made the predictable fuss about taking a cat into a room and an autobellhop is not responsive to bribes—hardly an improvement. But the assistant manager had more flexibility in his synapses; He listened to reason as long as it was crisp and rustled.”

“Women seem to have almost unlimited capacity for forgiveness. (Since it is usually a man who needs forgiveness, this must be a racial survival trait.)”

“A man who bets on greed and dishonesty won’t be wrong too often.”

““Sharpie, you’ve got a one-track mind.”
“It’s the main track. Reproduction is the main track; the methods and mores of sexual copulation are the central feature of all higher developments of life.”
“You’re ignoring money and television.”
“Piffle! All human activities including scientific research are either mating dances and care of the young, or the dismal sublimations of born losers in the only game in town.””

“No philosopher allows his opinions to be swayed by facts—he would be kicked out of his guild. Theologians, the lot of them.”

““Peewee!” I said sharply. “You're not listening.”
“What were you doing talking,” she answered reasonably, “when I wasn’t listening?””

“I hadn’t learned much in high school; I had majored in girls.”

“Since when did a mathematician need any tools but his own head? Pythagoras had done well enough with a stick and a stretch of sand.”

“I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy…censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

“The answer to any question starting, "Why don't they—" is almost always, "Money."”

“The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.”

“I don’t believe in luck, Sam. Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius.”

“Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow.”

“Matt, you are suffering from a disease of youth—you expect moral problems to have nice, neat, black-and-white answers.”

“I carried out my purpose: War and Peace, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and so forth. Would you believe it? Something is gained in translation; the originals are even more depressing and soporific than translations. I’m not sure what purpose Russian fiction has, but it can’t be entertainment.”

“At fourteen months he began speaking in sentences, short and of his own structure, but sentences. The subjects of his conversation, or, rather, his statements, were consistently egocentric. Normal again—no one expects an infant to write essays on the beauties of altruism.”

“I have never been able to see life as anything but a vast complicated practical joke, and it’s better to laugh than cry.”

“At that point I realized that I had been thinking in Russian. It’s a wonderful language for paranoid thoughts.”

“The best things in history are accomplished by people who get “tired of being shoved around.””

“A man who marries at my age isn’t taking a wife, he’s indenturing a nurse.”

“The truth of a proposition has little or nothing to do with its psychodynamics. The notion that ‘truth will prevail’ is merely a pious wish; history doesn’t show it.”

“I dictated my report; forty recruitments all okayed by the Psych Bureau — counting my own, which I knew would be okayed. I was here, wasn't I? Then I taped a request for assignment to operations; I was sick of recruiting.”

““If there was anything, anything more at all, after this crazy mix-up we call living, I could feel that there might be some point to the whole frantic business, even if I did not know and could not know the full answer while I was alive.”
“And suppose there was not? Suppose that when a man’s body disintegrates, he himself disappears absolutely. I’m bound to say I find it a probable hypothesis.”
“Well— It wouldn’t be cheerful knowledge, but it would be better than not knowing. You could plan your life rationally, at least. A man might even be able to get a certain amount of satisfaction in planning things better for the future, after he’s gone. A vicarious pleasure in the anticipation.””

““You know the answers, but just between ourselves, that sketch smells a bit. It’s sloppy.”
“I never did have any artistic talent,” Art said defensively. “I’d rather take a photograph any day.”
“You’ve taken too many photographs, maybe. As for artistic talent, I haven’t any either, but I learned to sketch. Look, Art—the rest of you guys get this, too—if you can’t sketch, you can’t see. If you really see what you’re looking at, you can put it down on paper, accurately. If you really remember what you have looked at, you can sketch it accurately from memory.”
“But the lines don’t go where I intend them to.”
“A pencil will go where you push it. It hasn’t any life of its own. The answer is practice and more practice and thinking about what you are looking at. All of you lugs want to be scientists. Well, the ability to sketch accurately is as necessary to a scientist as his slipstick. More necessary, you can get along without a slide rule.””

“Protoplasm is protean; any simple protoplasm can become any complex form of life under mutation and selection.”