23 Robert A. Heinlein Quotes on Society

Robert A. Heinlein quotes on society

5. An armed society is a polite society.

6. The whole principle is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak.

28. Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

32. Ben, the ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with -- in the face of a preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called 'morals.' Most of us know the code is wrong; almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck. You, too, Ben. You fancy yourself a free soul -- and break that evil code. But faced with a problem in sexual ethics new to you, you tested it against that same Judeo-Christian code...so automatically your stomach did flip-flops...and you think that proves you're right and they're wrong. Faugh! I'd as lief use trial by ordeal.

38. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to so something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good

46. A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved.

52. A woman is not property, and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dreamworld.

54. All men are created unequal.

55. All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can - and must - be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a 'perfect society' on any foundation other than 'Women and children first!' is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly - and no doubt will keep on trying.

56. A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.

65. Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

77. Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

96. In a mature society, 'civil servant' is semantically equal to 'civil master.'

103. Men are more sentimental than women. It blurs their thinking.

112. '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.

113. No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and, in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: 'Come back with your shield, or on it.' Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome.

136. The two highest achievements of the human mind are the twin concepts of 'loyalty' and 'duty.' Whenever these twin concepts fall into disrepute - get out of there fast! You may possibly save yourself, but it is too late to save that society. It is doomed.

141. Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded - here and there, now and then - are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck.'

146. When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

148. Whenever women have insisted on absolute equality with men, they have invariably wound up with the dirty end of the stick. What they are and what they can do makes them superior to men, and their proper tactic is to demand special privileges, all the traffic will bear. They should never settle merely for equality. For women, 'equality' is a disaster.

154. Patriotism is not sentimental nonsense. Nor something dreamed up by demagogues. Patriotism is as necessary a part of man's evolutionary equipment as are his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual.

159. The next level in moral behavior higher than that exhibited by the baboon is that in which duty and loyalty are shown toward a group of your own kind too large for an individual to know all of them. We have a name for that. It is called 'patriotism.'

162. Men are expendable; women and children are not. A tribe or a nation can lose a high percentage of its men and still pick up the pieces and go on: as long as the women and children are saved. But if you fail to save the women and children, you've had it, you're done, you're through! You join Tyrannosaurus Rex, one more breed that bilged its final test.