Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

I've been on this earth for sixty-six years, and I've reached a conclusion and it's a fact: women are strange creatures.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I'm no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

Women are all so far Machiavellians that they are never either good or bad by halves; their passions are too strong, and their reason too weak, to do anything with moderation.

A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self indulgence.

I was reminding myself of the one basic rule for experts on females: confine yourself absolutely to explaining why she did what she has already done because that will save the trouble of explaining why she didn't do what you said she would.

And yet the motives of women are so inscrutable. You remember the woman at Margate whom I suspected for the same reason. No powder on her nose - that proved to be the correct solution. How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs.

Women can less easily surmount their coquetry than their passions.

What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?

Woman - for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: "Blind yourself, for I am blind."

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

When female minds are embittered by age or solitude, their malignity is generally exerted in a rigorous and spiteful superintendence of domestic trifles.

All I asked was that I be spared surprises, although, in this world of six billion souls, all acting with free will and too many with audacity, surprises are inevitable, too few of them are the kind that make you smile and that lift your heart.

Women have much more heart and much more imagination than men; hence, fancy often allures them.

No woman ever yet either reasoned or acted long together consequentially; but some little thing, some love, some resentment, somepresent momentary interest, some supposed slight, or some humour, always breaks in upon, and oversets their most prudent resolutions and schemes.

Fate rules. You follow the steps and you plan and you work. Then fate slips in laughing and makes fools of us. Sometimes we can trick it or out guess it but most often its already written. For some its written in blood. That doesn't mean we stop, but it does mean we can't comfort ourselves with blame. It's easier to take the blame than to admit there was nothing you could do to stop whatever happened.

Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.

Fate. You could never anticipate it.

Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.

If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.

Harry," Bob drawled, his eye lights flickering smugly, "what you know about women, I could juggle.

It was something... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.

But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do

Tide comes in, tide goes out, you can't explain it!

Women were formed to temper Mankind, and sooth them into Tenderness and Compassion; not to set an Edge upon their Minds, and blowup in them those Passions which are too apt to rise of their own Accord.