Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

Bureaucracies tend to grow and to brag about their growth based on how many individuals they have and how much money they spend.

Salary arbitration is probably in place - was put in place then and probably is in place now - because I supported it.

I do have personal relationships with a lot of "fans," in quotations. I answer all my mail, I get emails from fans, and I try to answer them all. That's important to me, but occasionally there's the thing where people basically ask me to write book reports for them, and I don't have that kind of time. I feel like there's a certain sexism involved, like because I'm a woman I'm supposed to constantly be like giving to everybody.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

Why is it, that giving guns is so easy, but giving books is so hard?

Though the water running in the fountain be every ones, yet who can doubt, but that in the pitcher is his only who drew it out?

A cardinal rule of bureaucracy is that it is better to extend an error than to admit a mistake.

The tax code is 10 times the size of the Bible with none of the good news.

It's easier to apologize afterwards than getting something allowed in the first place.

What does 'economic justice' mean, except that you want something that someone else produced, without having to produce anything yourself in return?

He looked at the book, took my name, and consulted his records. Then he informed me I had been lost at sea and was dead. Under the circumstances, he could not possibly give me any money... Even the fact that he was dealing with someone who had been dead for several days failed to awaken interest in his official heart.

The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.

The first EDSer to see a snake kills it. At GM, first thing you do is organize a committee on snakes. Then you bring in a consultant who knows a lot about snakes. Third thing you do is talk about it for a year.

...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Barontage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; . . .

Sometimes when I'm told to use my own discretion, if no one is looking I'll use someone else's. But I always put it back.

We're not attempting to circumcise rules.

My personal view is that nobody should stand between an employer and employee when it comes to employment contract negations. Not the government and not meddlesome third parties. This includes the ability for individuals to bargain collectively with their employers.

Year after year after year, people write books about managing innovation or about leadership, for example, without ever going through the pain of saying, "This kind of leadership will cause this result in these circumstances and a very different result in those circumstances." This is academic malpractice of the worst kind.

There was no Marshall Plan for Harry Potter, no International Financing Facility for books about underage wizards. It is heartbreaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can't get twelve-cent medicine to dying poor children.

America is the only developed nation in the world with no guaranteed paid leave of any kind. That means we're leaving a whole lot of talent on the sidelines.

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.

Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

The concept of equal pay for equal work is not only an impossible task, it can only be accomplished with the total rejection of the idea of the voluntary contract... The idea that a businessman must hire anyone and is prevented from firing anyone for any reason he chooses, and in the name of rights, is a clear indication that the basic concept of a free society has been lost.

All that Lenin learned about business from the tales of his comrades who occasionally sat in business offices was that it required a lot of scribbling, recording, and ciphering. Thus, he declares that accounting and control are the chief things necessary for the organizing and correct functioning of society. . . . Here we have the philosophy of the filing clerk in its full glory.