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!!”

“Behaving on a still higher moral level were the astronauts who went to the Moon, for their actions tend toward the survival of the entire race of mankind.”

““What of it? I’d still be myself. I don’t care what people think.”
“You’re mistaken, son. To believe that you can live free of your cultural matrix is one of the easiest fallacies and has some of the worst consequences. You are part of your group whether you like it or not, and you are bound by its customs.””

“Hans had courage to burn. If he had been willing to knuckle under to the Nazis he would have stayed at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. But Hans was a scientist. He wouldn’t trim his notion of truth to fit political gangsters.”

“"No man is an island — " Much as we may feel and act as Individuals, our race is —a single organism, always growing and branching —which must be pruned regularly to be healthy.
This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth.
Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods —killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of "He's dead and I'm alive and that's the way I wanted it to be."
But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right.
But I don't have to like it —and I don't.”

“The future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands…with tools…with horse sense and science and engineering.”

“Theobald ignored him. He could be deaf when he chose; he seemed to find it particularly difficult to hear the word “No.””

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

“Er, will your grandmother tell that fib for you?”
“I guess so. Yes, I'm sure she will. She says people have to tell little white fibs or else people couldn’t stand each other. But she says fibs were meant to be used, not abused.”

“Mary? After all, what was she? Just another babe. True, I was disgusted with her for letting herself be used as bait. It was all right for her to use her femaleness as an agent; the Section had to have female operatives. There have always been female spies, and the young and pretty ones have always used the same tools.”

“Oh, we get along. She lets me have my own way, and later I find out I’ve done just what she wanted me to do.”

“Don took it and said, “Uh, thanks! That’s awfully kind of you. I’ll pay it back, first chance.”
“Instead, pay it forward to some other brother who needs it.””

“So-called instincts are instructive, Felix. They point to survival values.”

“All humans are created unequal. You are bigger and stronger than Pop; I am bigger and stronger than Hilda. I have the least years of experience; Pop has the most. Pop is a super-genius…but he concentrates so hard that he forgets to eat…unless he has a nursemaid to watch him—as Mama did, as I did, as Hilda now does. You, sir, are the all-around most competent man I’ve ever met, whether driving a duo, or dancing, or telling outrageous tales. Three of us have eight or nine earned degrees…but Aunt Hilda with none is a walking encyclopedia from insatiable curiosity and extraordinary memory. We two are baby factories and you two are not—but two men can impregnate fifty women—or five hundred. There is no end to the ways that we four are unequal.”

“Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative.”

“Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive. The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to the extent of the food supply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life—the ragged edge of starvation.”

“I trust that I am honest with myself. I know that I am not very sociable and I expect to go on being so; a man capable of creative work has no time to spare for fools who would like to visit.”

“From my point of view it is better to be alive and young again, and broke, than it is to be the richest corpse in Forest Lawn.”

“An invention is something that was “impossible” up to then—that’s why governments grant patents.”

“I am learning that we still have things to learn.”

“I counted to ten slowly, using binary notation.”

“Every law that was ever written opened up a new way to graft.”

“If at Last You Do Succeed, Never Try Again.”

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

“A man has to grow up in a language to be able to understand it scrambled.”

“How long has this racket been going on?”

“There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk "his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown children, can never be anything else.”

“He was still having trouble readjusting. Wars were something you studied, not something that actually happened.”

“Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men.”

“The Koran cannot be translated — the "map" changes on translation no matter how carefully one tries.”