The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

by Robert A. Heinlein

“I’m not sure what I mean by ‘alive,’” she admitted. “There’s a scientific definition, isn’t there? Irritability, or some such. And reproduction.”

Revolution is an art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve. Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying as a victory.”

Prof set us straight: Easier to get people to hate than to get them to love.

One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die . . . and accepts his sentence undismayed.”

Certain types of loudmouthism should be a capital offense among decent people.

The dead man is Thomas Jefferson—first of the rational anarchists, my boy, and one who once almost managed to slip over his non-system through the most beautiful rhetoric ever written. But they caught him at it, which I hope to avoid.

“Well . . . I still say that’s a dangling participle, but okay, leave it in.”

If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted it myself till I met a computer with sense of humor.

From somewhere, back in my youth, heard Prof say, “Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.”