The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

by Robert A. Heinlein

I wasn’t impressed. As it says in Bible, God fights on side of heaviest artillery.

I long ago quit being disappointed in men for what they are not and never can be.’

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.

Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?’

‘I can get along with a Randite. A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as “state” and “society” and “government” have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame … as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world … aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.’

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.

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.’

‘Sovereign,’ like ‘love,’ means anything you want it to mean; it’s a word in dictionary between ‘sober’ and ‘sozzled.’

Think I prefer a place as openly racist as India, where if you aren’t Hindu, you’re nobody – except that Parsees look down on Hindus and vice versa. However I never really had to cope with North America’s reverse-racism when being ‘Colonel O’Kelly Davis, Hero of Lunar Freedom.’

Baseball is better over video, you can really see it and aren’t pushed in by two hundred thousand other people.

Half the food on this planet is in the black market, or is not reckoned through one ruling or another. Or they keep two sets of books, and figures submitted to the F.N. having nothing to do with the economy. Do you think that grain from Thailand and Burma and Australia is correctly reported to the Control Board by Great China? I’m sure that the India representative on that food board doesn’t. But India keeps quiet because she gets the lion’s share from Luna … and then “plays politics with hunger’ – a phrase you may remember – by using our grain to control her elections. Kerala had a planned famine last year. Did you see it in the news?’

‘But you have no talent for dishonesty, so your refuge must be ignorance and stubbornness. You have the latter; try to preserve the former.

So when this male-female team started quizzing about family life in Luna, was happy to answer. I prettied it only by what I left out –

‘They arise, as marriage customs always do, from economic necessities of the circumstances – and our circumstances are very different from those here on Earth. Take the line type of marriage which my colleague has been praising … and justifiably, I assure you, despite his personal bias – I am a bachelor and have no bias. Line marriage is the strongest possible device for conserving capital and insuring the welfare of children – the two basic societal functions for marriage everywhere – in an environment in which there is no security, neither for capital nor for children, other than that devised by individuals. Somehow human beings always cope with their environments. Line marriage is a remarkably successful invention to that end. All other Lunar forms of marriage serve that same purpose, though not as well.’

‘Conceded, sir, but Professor de la Paz pointed out that you don’t get milk by beating a cow. And certainly can’t by shooting it.’

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.’

The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it continues until it destroys. I

some people talk better if they breathe vacuum.