Stranger in a Strange Land

by Robert A. Heinlein

a government is a living organism. Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive. You hit it, it will fight back.

If I don’t start having some service around here I’m going to swap all of you for a dog and shoot the dog.

man, a social animal, could not avoid having government, any more than an individual man could escape his lifelong bondage to his bowels.

There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.

Most do-gooding reminds me of treating hemophilia—the only real cure for hemophilia is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death . . . before they breed more hemophiliacs.”

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. 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?

But art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human.