Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have.

Many people have tried to define science fiction. I like to call it the literature of exploration and change. While other genres obsess upon so-called eternal verities, SF deals with the possibility that our children may have different problems. They may, indeed, be different than we have been.

Science fiction is the very literature of change.

Creative thinking inspires ideas. Ideas inspire change.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

We live in a quickly changing world, therefore we must foretell developments, and reforms should respond to these changes

Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.

The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.

Before we can build the world we want to live in, we have to imagine it.

Everything great that ever happened in this world happened first in somebody’s imagination.

The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.

Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.

My first obligation is to entertain but as far as science fiction goes, it's much easier to comment on today from another time because people then aren't focused on 'did you get the details right?' It's sort of a Trojan horse approach to ideas because it's wrapped in the future, it's wrapped in action, thriller.

One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.

The world is continually changing. I think in some ways it's changing in a very positive way.

I think the world is changing. And it's changing so fast that people have to change with it.

With a little luck that epoch may arrive. I am on the side of those who think that things will go better when the world has changed.

Scientists are embarrassed by science fiction; they want to distance themselves as much as possible. ... I think there's nothing to be ashamed of [and that] we should take science fiction seriously.

The thing that's interesting about science fiction is that it is always, when it is done well, a lens on our world. And yet it is a metaphor.

Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about.

The things that worked for us in the past wasn't going to work the same way going forward.

Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.

As the world changes, the way we work changes with it.

Things are constantly evolving, and anything could happen. And that's exciting to me.