Beyond This Horizon Quotes

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon

“Nothing gives life more zest that running for your life.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon

“Harlan Ellison remembered his sensawunda shock when he opened Beyond This Horizon for the first time: [A] character came through a door that . . . dilated. And no discussion. Just: “The door dilated.” I read across it, and was two lines down before I realized what the image had been that the words had urged forth. A dilating door. It didn’t open, it irised! Dear God, how I knew I was in a future world!” Heinlein had unfolded and brought to life an entire world in just a few words. “The door dilated” has been used ever since as the best example of how to write science fiction, to show, rather than tell, and to provide the excitement of very different futures.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon

“But man is a working animal. He likes to work.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon

“I see. Well—got everything you want?” “Yes,” admitted Monroe-Alpha, “unless you should happen to have concealed, somewhere about your person, a hypersphere, a hypersurface, and some four-dimensional liquid, suitable for fine lubrication.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon

“You!” “Uh huh. Me. Old calm-as-a-cat Felix. It’s going to take hold, I tell you. It’s going to be popular. We’ll sell permissions to view it physically and then all sorts of lesser rights—direct pick-up, recording, and so forth. Smith has a lot of ideas about identifying various combinations with cities and organizations and attaching color symbols to them and songs and things. He’s full of ideas—an amazing young man, for a barbarian.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon

“Mordan nodded. “No doubt. It’s a common failing, and it’s been with the race as long as it has had social organization. A little businessman thinks his tiny business is as complex and difficult as the whole government. By inversion, he conceives himself as competent to plan the government as the chief executive. Going further back in history, I’ve no doubt that many a peasant thought the job of the king was a simple one and that he could do it better if he only had a chance. What it boils down to is lack of imagination and overwhelming conceit.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon

“The story is a post-utopia, a somewhat revolutionary form when it was published—and one reader-critic (Jamie Todd Rubin) called it “the first generally ‘post-Singularity’ story ever written in science fiction” (if we had not lost our faith in the American utopian vision, it might have had imitators instead of the wave after wave of dystopias we did get—and continue to get).”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon