An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

Robert A. Heinlein

Because it’s always the right time to quote Heinlein…

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. 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.

TANSTAAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent— the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority… while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?

Starship Troopers

“If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off? Of course not. You’d paddle it. There can be circumstances when it’s just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him…but to make him do what you want to do. Not killing…but controlled and purposeful violence.

There is an old song which asserts that “the best things in life are free”. Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted… and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.

Just some of the excellent quotes from just two of Heinlein’s novels.  Starship Troopers is on the reading list of all four US defence force academies.   Stranger in a Strange Land, on the other hand, was a hippie icon.  Heinlein invented the words grok, waldo and moonbat, and the term TANSTAAFL.  And he wrote 32 novels, covering an incredible variety of topics and a stunning depth of political and social thought, all eccentric and original, and never politically correct.
Robert A. Heinlein’s 100th birthday would be July 7, 2007.  There is a campaign to remember the ex-naval officer, and his predilection for futuristic weaponry, by naming a new DDG-1000 stealth destroyer the USS Robert A. Heinlein.  How about it?

Posted by Phil on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 1:14 am.