Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 21 quotes that I liked and saved while reading The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress book by Robert A. Heinlein. I hope you will like them too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Quotes
- Revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror.
- Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.
- I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
- Killing is not the way to handle a spy, not when he doesn’t know that you know that he is a spy […]. The thing to do with a spy is to let him breathe, encyst him with loyal comrades, and feed him harmless information to please his employers.
- Don’t explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.
- Nothing frustrates a man so much as not letting him get in his say.
- One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die … and accepts his sentence undismayed.
- Anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless.
- Those who adjust to facts stay alive; those who don’t are dead and no problem.
- Like a perfect dinner, a revolution has to be “cooked” so that everything comes out even.
- Women are amazing creatures – sweet, soft, gentle, and far more savage than we are.
- There are only two things to do with an enemy: Kill him. Or make a friend of him. Anything in between piles up trouble for the future.
- More than six people cannot agree on anything; three is better – and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest.
- Gentlemen, I am not an engineer. But I have learned this about engineers. When something must be done, engineers can find a way that is economically feasible.
- Never mind financial aspects. Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds.
- A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, for the managers … and its greatest strength is a ‘free press’ when ‘free’ is defined as ‘responsible’ and the managers define what is ‘irresponsible.’.
- Comrade Members, like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master.
- It may not be possible to do away with government – sometimes I think that government is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive – and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby?
- The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys.
- If possible, leave room for your enemy to become your friend.
- When faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.