Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

… the third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

If you don't mind haunting the margins, I think there is more freedom there.

By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed.

Like most creative people I don't fit well into boxes.

Think for yourself and question authority.

Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contrivances.

I have never limited myself by focusing much on being a 'normal' teenager.

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society…

Genius does not herd with genius.

Never judge something by whether it is popular or not. You don't have to follow trends. No one thought William Wilberforce was right at first.

I have only a mind to live, to enjoy - i.e., to work as an artist, and produce my works; but not for the muddy brains of the common herd.

We had a heroic attitude to artistic freedom, and we thought normal contracts were a bit vulgar - somehow not punk. But that was the whole point - we weren't a regular record label.

I wasn't overwhelmed by dogma, and that sort of freed me up to look at things differently.

I am not a conformist.

You do not move forward by following convention. You celebrate those who are different, who are not burdened by 'normality.'

I think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.

Yes, I am mad - like the Marquis de Sade was mad, like Giordano Bruno was mad, like Antonin Artaud was mad.

There's always somebody telling you what you're not supposed to like. But that's not the way I grew up.

My message to women is it's okay not to toe the party line on every issue. You don't have to be a puppet or a mouthpiece for your party on every issue. You can be an independent thinker; you can take it issue by issue, and that's okay. You shouldn't be told, 'You can't sit with us.'

The first thing a genius needs is to breath free air.

Genius does not care much for a set of explicit regulations, but that does not mean that genius is lawless.

The big characters who occupy science, especially modern science, are all "off" in fundamental ways. I don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think. I wanted to pay tribute to that mind.

Let us put aside resolutely that great fright, tenderly and without malice, daring to be wrong in something important rather than right in some meticulous banality, fearing no evil while the mind is free to search, imagine, and conclude, inviting our countrymen to try other instruments than coercion and suppression in the effort to meet destiny with triumph, genially suspecting that no creed yet calendared in the annals of politics mirrors the doomful possibilities of infinity.