Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
45 quotes
"The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for---if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most."
"Death isn't funny." "Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it."
"Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness."
"It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence."
"People simplify 'Apollonian' into 'mild', and 'calm', and 'cool'. But 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin--a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox."
"The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together."
"The country and culture commonly known as "America" had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees---its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian."
"Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers."
"It's a long story. Want a refill?""No, let's start the steak. Where's the button?""Right here.""Well, push it.""Me? You offered to cook.""Ben Caxton, I will lie here and starve before I will get up to push a button six inches from your finger""As you wish." He pressed the button. "But don't forget who cooked dinner."
"I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth--then shut up."
"He had learned that close-held secrets could often be cracked by going all the way to the top and there making himself unbearably unpleasant. He knew that such twisting of the tiger's tail was dangerous, for he understood the psychopathology of great power."
"Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time."
"Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times"
"It is almost impossible to shake of one's earliest training. Duke, can you get it through your skull that had you been brought up by Martians, you would have the same attitude toward eating and being eaten as Mike has."
"Daughters can spend ten percent more than a man can make in any usual occupation. That’s a law of nature, to be known henceforth as ‘Harshaw’s Law."
"Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight."
"All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction."
"Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe - and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes - make him feel shame if he doesn't have it."
"Customs, morals--is there a difference?"
"The drive for power is even less logical than the sex urge . . . and stronger."
"Oh, you have to charge 'em, Jubal. The marks won't pay attention if it's free."
"I'm always suspicious of disinterested interest."
"Do you know your Bible?''Uh, not very well.''It merits study, it contains very practical advice for most emergencies."
"English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing."
"…the greatest danger to man in space was man himself."