Robert A. Heinlein’s Legacy

Posted July 26, 2007, 12:59 p.m.

My favorite author is Robert A. Heinlein, so it was a real pleasure to see him discussed in the pages of today’s Wall St. Journal. Heinlein’s work, for those of you haven’t read it, is incredible. While his earliest novels were published in the 1940s, they have stood the test of time are are—with rare exception—as-good or better reads today than when originally released. He predicted many technologies we consider commonplace today (like wireless phones) decades before they became reality. Though sometimes controversial or offensive, Heinlein’s books never fail to make you think—even if you’re not a fan of science fiction.

Robert A. Heinlein’s Legacy (Wall St. Journal; free email subscription may be required).

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

We must strive to reach that simplicity that lies beyond sophistication.

Artists must be contending with something they do not understand, or they are not artists.

We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American.

Ideas are cheap. It’s only what you do with them that counts.

Thus many were shot—thousands at first, then hundreds of thousands. We divide, we multiply, we sigh, we curse. But still and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the mind and then are easily forgotten.

[Investment] is the sacrificing of real things today in order to have more real things in the future.

It’s always good to break ice that you’re not standing on.

Most men are not untrue, but they are afraid. Most of the errors of public life . . . come not because men are morally bad, but because they are afraid of somebody.

All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve.

Neither can Creation be fully grasped by physics, since scientists cannot go outside the cosmos to measure it. It is akin to a child trying to prove a final theory of how his house works when he is incapable of toddling outside its doors.

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

The rhetoric about ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ hardly deserves comment. Those who tell truth by the clock or the calendar are practicing chronological snobbery.

The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole.

Do not take life too seriously, you will never get out of it alive.

Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? . . . If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?

Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous.

Christianity . . . divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

Now anything the people demand that is right it is most clearly and most emphatically the duty of this Legislature to do; but we should never yield to what they demand if it is wrong.

Life is just one damn thing after another.

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