99+ Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes & Sayings with Wallpapers & Posters - Quotes.Pub

Here you will find all the famous Stranger in a Strange Land quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our Stranger in a Strange Land quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Stranger in a Strange Land wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes by some of the famous authors like Robert A. Heinlein

It is almost impossible to shake of one's earliest training. Duke, can you get it through your skull that had you been brought up by Martians, you would have the same attitude toward eating and being eaten as Mike has.

Nature Quotes Truth Quotes / Belief Quotes Nurture Quotes Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes Upbringing Quotes

A little more money won’t do you any good—because daughters can use up ten percent more than a man can make in any normal occupation, regardless of the amount. That’s a widely experienced but previously unformulated law of nature, to be known henceforth as ‘Harshaw’s Law.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. Nobody tried to stop this process, the way some languages are policed and have official limits . . . probably because there never has been, truly, such a thing as ‘the King’s English’—for ‘the King’s English’ was French. English was in truth a bastard tongue and nobody cared how it grew . . . and it did!—enormously.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

We came here for a quiet, small, informal meeting—strictly business. We find you’ve turned it into a circus. Well, if you’re going to have a circus, you’ve got to have elephants and there’s no two ways about it.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

He held a vast but carefully concealed distaste for all things American. Their incredible polytheistic babel of religions, of course, although they were hardly to be blamed for that . . . their cooking (cooking!!!), their manners, their bastard architecture and sickly arts . . . and their blind, pathetic, arrogant belief in their superiority long after their sun had set. Their women. Their women most of all, their immodest, assertive women, with their gaunt, starved bodies which nevertheless reminded him disturbingly of houris.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

To Mahmoud, Harshaw looked like a museum exhibit of what he thought of as a “Yank”—vulgar, dressed too informally for the occasion, loud, probably ignorant and almost certainly provincial. A professional man, too, which made it worse, as in Dr. Mahmoud’s experience most American professional men were under-educated and narrow, mere technicians.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

The capacity of a human mind to believe devoutly in what seems to me to be the highly improbable—from table tapping to the superiority of their own children—has never been plumbed. Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don’t argue with it—especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Democracy’s worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents—a depressingly low level, but what else can you expect?

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Nope. Gadflies such as yourself are utterly necessary. Nor am I opposed to ‘turning the rascals out’—it’s usually the soundest rule of politics. But it’s well to take a look at what new rascals you are going to get before you jump at any chance to turn your present rascals out.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Men are always for hire who like dirty work.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

See here, son, if a deputy sheriff beats a prisoner to death, it’s sweepstakes odds that the county commissioners didn’t order it, didn’t know it, and wouldn’t have permitted it had they known. At worst they shut their eyes to it—afterwards—rather than upset their own applecarts. But assassination has never been an accepted policy in this country.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Either way, I have no wish to disturb a man sleeping in a gutter; I assume until proved otherwise that he belongs there.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

I did it for a little girl who was about to go charging out and maybe get herself killed much the same way—if I didn’t do something. I did it because she was my guest and I temporarily stood in loco parentis to her. I did it because she was all guts and gallantry but too ignorant to be allowed to monkey with such a buzz saw; she’d get hurt. But you, my cynical and sin-stained chum, know all about those buzz saws. If your own asinine carelessness caused you to back into one, who am I to tamper with your karma? You picked it.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Jubal waved the man back. “Private,” he said firmly. “Family matter. Go have a drink.” “Whose family?” “A death in yours, if you insist. Scat!

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

It took you long enough to answer your phone.” “It’s my phone, Mr. Secretary. Sometimes I don’t answer it at all.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

My child, a true-confession story should never be tarnished by any taint of truth.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Here’s to alcoholic brotherhood . . . much more suited to the frail human soul, if any, than any other sort.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Duke, almost the only human characteristic Mike seems to possess is an overwhelming desire to be liked.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

I’ve never been able to understand ‘faith’ myself, nor to see how a just God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion out of an infinitude of false ones—by faith alone. It strikes me as a sloppy way to run an organization, whether a universe or a smaller one.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

I wouldn’t want Larry to die through my oversight. Larry is entitled to work out his own damn foolishness without having it cut short through my carelessness. Duke, I believe in everyone’s working out his own damnation his own way . . . but nevertheless that is no excuse for an adult to give a dynamite cap to a baby as a toy.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

She hesitated slightly. “I’ve seen what was called telekinesis with dice—but I’m no mathematician and I could not testify that what I saw was telekinesis.” “Hell’s bells, you wouldn’t testify that the sun had risen if the day was cloudy.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

You evaded my question.” “Then perhaps you had better assume that I intended to evade it.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

I think you were telling the truth, Jill. But a dream is a true experience of a sort and so is a hypnotic delusion.

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The second point I want to make is that you are right; the boy does indeed have to learn human customs. He must be taught to take off his shoes in a mosque and to wear his hat in a synagogue and to cover his nakedness when taboo requires it, or our tribal shamans will burn him for deviationism. But, child, by the myriad deceptive aspects of Ahriman, don’t brainwash him in the process. Make sure he is cynical about each part of it.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

The Japanese have five different ways to say ‘thank you’—and every one of them translates literally as resentment, in various degrees. Would that English had the same built-in honesty on this point! Instead, English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing. ‘Gratitude,’ for example.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Gratitude’ is a euphemism for resentment. Resentment from most people I do not mind—but from pretty little girls it is distasteful to me.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

you are not in my debt. You can’t be. Impossible—because I never do anything I don’t want to do. Nor does anyone, but in my case I am always aware of it.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Sit back down—and for God’s sake quit trying to be as nasty as I am; you don’t have my years of practice.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Jill, of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to do, every time. If it sometimes pains them to make a choice - if the choice turns out to look like a 'noble sacrifice' - you can be sure that it is in no wise nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness . . . the unpleasant necessity of having to decide between two things both of which you would like to do when you can't do both. The ordinary bloke suffers that discomfort every day, every time he makes a choice between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids, between getting up when he's tired or spending the day in his warm bed and losing his job. No matter which he does he always chooses what seems to hurt least or pleasures most. The average chump spends his life harried by these small decisions. But the utter scoundrel and the perfect saint merely make the same choices on a larger scale. They still pick what pleases them.

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I wish we had somebody here who never would be missed. Regrettably we are all friends.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

You’re not privileged to call me ‘Boss’; you’re not tax deductible.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

the government’—that’s too sweeping a term. ‘The government’ is several million people, nearly a million in Washington alone. We have to ask ourselves: Whose toes were being stepped on? What person or persons? Not ‘the government’—but what individuals?

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Anne is so thoroughly indoctrinated that it doesn’t even occur to her to infer that the other side is probably white, too. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t force her to commit herself as to the far side . . . unless she herself went around to the other side and looked—and even then she wouldn’t assume that it stayed whatever color it might be after she left . . . because they might repaint it as soon as she turned her back.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

The fact that Ben retained Cavendish shows how seriously he took the matter; you don’t hunt rabbits with an elephant gun.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Don’t bawl over Ben—not in my presence. The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death . . . and that we are all in for—if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

That boy skates close to the edge, he always has. He’s utterly fearless and that’s how he’s made his reputation. But the rabbit is never more than two jumps ahead of the coyote . .

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

It doesn’t make sense. Or, rather, it makes just one kind of sense. Hanky-panky. Ben is as used to hanky-panky as a bride is to kisses. He didn’t get to be one of the best winchells in the business through playing his cards face up.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth stupid fumbling—oh, he conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid having government, any more than an individual man could escape his lifelong bondage to his bowels. But Harshaw did not have to like it. Simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it a “good.” He wished that government would wander off and get lost!

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Harshaw had the arrogant humility of the man who has learned so much that he is aware of his own ignorance and he saw no point in “measurements” when he did not know what he was measuring.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Unexpected discorporation was always rare on Mars; Martian taste in such matters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death taking place at the appropriate and selected instant. This artist, however, had become so preoccupied with his work that he had forgotten to come in out of the cold; by the time his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He himself had not noticed his own discorporation and had gone right on composing his sequence.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Human bipolarity was both the binding force and the driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerate on this point, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Dorcas, for the last twenty or thirty years I’ve been a worthless, useless, no-good parasite.” She nodded and yawned again. “Everybody knows that.” “Never mind the flattery. There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to stop being sensible—a time to stand up and be counted—strike a blow for liberty—smite the wicked.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

He did not expect reasonable conduct from human beings; he considered most people fit candidates for protective restraint and wet packs. He simply wished heartily that they would leave him alone!—all but the few he chose for playmates. He was firmly convinced that, left to himself, he would have long since achieved nirvana . . . dived into his own belly button and disappeared from view, like those Hindu jokers. Why couldn’t they leave a man alone?

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

Whereupon people would come barging into his sanctuary, asking stupid questions and making stupid demands . . . and he, Jubal Harshaw, would have to make decisions and take action. Since he was philosophically convinced that all action was futile, the prospect irritated him.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

In the course of nearly a century of gusty living he had been broke many times, had several times been wealthier than he now was; he regarded both conditions as he did shifts in the weather, and never counted his change.

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The fact that he had broken his oath more times than there were years intervening did not trouble him; his was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

If you turn out to be useful as well as ornamental, you can stay forever.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

He grokked that this was one of the critical cusps in the growth of a being wherein contemplation must bring forth right action in order to permit further growth. He acted.

Stranger in a Strange Land Quotes

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