6 Robert A. Heinlein Quotes on Family

Robert A. Heinlein quotes on family

74. Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.

76. Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

93. If the universe has any purpose more important than topping a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help, I've never heard of it.

110. Never crowd youngsters about their private affairs - sex especially. When they are growing up, they are nerve ends all over, and resent (quite properly) any invasion of their privacy. Oh, sure, they'll make mistakes - but that's their business, not yours. (You made your own mistakes, did you not?)

143. Touch is the most fundamental sense. A baby experiences it, all over, before he is born and long before he learns to use sight, hearing, or taste, and no human ever ceases to need it. Keep your children short on pocket money - but long on hugs.

157. The next higher level is to work, fight, and sometimes die for your own immediate family. This is the level at which six pounds of mother cat can be so fierce that she'll drive off a police dog. It is the level at which a father takes a moonlighting job to keep his kids in college - and the level at which a mother or father dives into a flood to save a drowning child: and it is still moral behavior even when it fails.