Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day: #52 and final in the series

About a year ago, I begin putting up quotes from Robert A. Heinlein. Like many people who have read some of his works, I find them sometimes to be inspiring, sometimes to be prophetic, sometimes disturbing and sometimes disgusting.

However, from the first time I checked out Space Cadet from the Anderson Air Force Base library on Guam when I was in 4th grade (I think I checked it out 10 or 12 more times after that), to reading the Red Planet (over and over) to my first encounters with Glory Road (teenage boy dream fodder that) to the many, many readings I have undertaken of Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I was/have been a Heinlein junkie.

Why?

Because of this:

Through science fiction the human race can try experiments in imagination too critically dangerous to try in fact. Through such speculative experiments science fiction can warn against dangerous solutions, urge toward better solutions. Science fiction joyously tackles the real and pressing problems of our race, wrestles with them, never ignores them—problems which other forms of fiction cannot challenge. For this reason I assert that science fiction is the most realistic, the most serious, the most significant, the most sane and healthy and human fiction being published today.

I'm sure there are hundreds of quotes available about the optimism of science fiction - that it assumes there will be a future. But no one ever expressed as well as Heinlein did the role science fiction plays or should play in helping us ponder that future.

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #51

From The Number of the Beast

I’m not sure what purpose Russian fiction has, but it can’t be entertainment.

By the way, this particular Heinlein book is not very good either.

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #50

From The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

You live and learn. Or you don't live long.

Which reminds me of Piet Hein's "Grook,"

THE ROAD TO WISDOM

The road to wisdom?
-- Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #49

From Time Enough for Love

Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow if tomorrow might improve the odds.

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #48

From

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

"A friend who offers help without asking for explanations is a treasure beyond price.”

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #47

From "The Happy Days Ahead"

. . . [T]he 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

Found in The Expanded Universe.

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #46

From Have Spacesuit, Will Travel

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

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day

From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long:

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny. 

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #45

From Time Enough for Love:

Don't ever become a pessimist... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #44

From Stranger in a Strange Land

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #44

From the postscript to Revolt in 2100:

The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.- Robert A. Heinlein

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day (even on a Sunday) #43

From The Past Through Tomorrow

I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious.
“If This Goes On—” Chapter 6

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #42

From Time Enough for Love on learning to be forehanded:

Anyone can see a forest fire. Skill lies in sniffing the first smoke.

- Robert A. Heinlein

Ever know enough about your job, car, plane or boat that you get that "vibe" that tells you something "bad" is about to erupt? That's why we have strategic planners peering off into the future and making all those contingency plans.

If everything happens "unexpectedly" you are not very good at your job.

Saturday is Heinlein Quote Day #41

From Friday

What are the marks of a sick culture?

It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.

A very bad sign. Particularism. It was once considered a Spanish vice but any country can fall sick with it. Dominance of males over females seems to be one of the symptoms.
***
Robert A. Heinlein

Interesting read on "The Muslim Balkanization of the West"American Thinker:

*** By giving incentive to Muslim immigrants to not only resist all assimilation, but to establish a separate country within a country, the French have effectively allowed the Balkanization of their homeland, which will alter it forever – and not for the better.

It is fine to allow diverse cultures to exist within a free society as long as they can exist peacefully side by side, recognizing a common legal and political system that represents everyone. But it is suicidal to encourage a multi-tiered society where one has no reason to recognize the legitimacy of the laws of the host country. This is also reflected in the United States, where there is move to assure immigrants who are here illegally that there are few or no repercussions for violating the law or disrespecting our borders.***

Saturday is Heinlein Quote Day (Sunday Edition) #40

From Time Enough for Love

“What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”

One of the tricks of the military planning cycle is to sort out difference between guessing an enemies "intentions" and assessing the facts of his capabilities.

Interesting notes on that topic here:

Especially that last sentence.

UPDATE: Hmmm. What about economic forecasts?

Heinlein Quote Special Edition: A Radio Version of "The Green Hills of Earth"

Back in the days before television or when we lived in places where there was no television, there was radio. Usually AM radio - static and all - it was. Sometimes, like when I was a kid on Guam, there was Armed Forces Radio transmitting recorded shows for the entertainment of the airmen and sailors (and the rest of the population, too.)

Here's a classic radio version of a Heinlein story that appeared in the pages of the old Saturday Evening Post in 1947. Back in the day having your fiction appear in that publication was a very big deal - my mother had one of her short stories published in the Post in 1961- and in Heinlein's case moved him from "pulp" sci-fi magazines to the slick pages of mainstream publishing.

In any event, pull up a chair and spend 23 minutes or so listening to "The Green Hills of Earth"

Saturday is Heinlein Quote Day #39

Revisiting #29

From the Man Who Sold the Moon (1950):

How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show — it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

Robert A. Heinlein

In light of Kim the Chubby from the DPRK's veto power over what an American company can put into the marketplace of ideas, consider these words from the past:

People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like — they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?
Winston Churchill, in "The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)", radio broadcast to the United States and to London (16 October 1938)

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #38

On deadlines and the dangers they pose:

NY Times quote:

"They didn't want it good, they wanted it Wednesday."

There is a reason why you take your time when, say, welding in a shipyard on components whose failure would have -um- negative results.

Saturday is Heinlein Quote Day #36

From Starship Troopers:

That old saw about "to understand all is to forgive all" is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them.

You can choose your own crimes to loathe.

I have my own list.

Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day #35

From Time Enough for Love:

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.

Hmm. Wonder if there is such a thing as national or group "neurotic insecurity?"