Space Cadet Quotes

“The sort of guardian you can hire is worth about as much as the sort of wife you can buy.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

“If I’ve reached the place where I’m a good influence on anybody, it’s time I cultivated some new vices.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

“Matt, you are suffering from a disease of youth—you expect moral problems to have nice, neat, black-and-white answers.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

“Men on the surface of a planet are as helpless against men in spaceships as a man would be trying to conduct a rock-throwing fight from the bottom of a well. The man at the top of the well has gravity working for him.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

“A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking. Commodore Arkwright realized that these tendencies are inherent and inescapable; he hoped to offset them a bit by setting up a course that could not be passed without original thinking.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

“She might get high enough to crash—no higher.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

“They flew her,” Matt pointed out. “Sure they did—and my hat’s off to them. But it takes heroes to fly a box as primitive as this and I’m not the hero type.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

“Strictly speaking, the Patrol is not a military organization at all.” “Sir?” “I know, I know—you are trained to use weapons, you are under orders, you wear a uniform. But your purpose is not to fight, but to prevent fighting, by every possible means. The Patrol is not a fighting organization; it is the repository of weapons too dangerous to entrust to military men.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

“This school is based on the idea that a man who can think correctly will automatically behave morally”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

“As his eye (sic) approached the distant, rounded horizon the details softened, giving a strong effect, of stereo, of depth, of three-dimensional globularness—the world indeed was round!”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

“He was staring over the bulge of the Earth at a curved horizon; he was seeing the Earth as round.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

“An officer in command of a ship of the Patrol, away from base, is the last of the absolute monarchs, for there is none but himself to restrain him. Many places where he must go no other authority reaches. He himself must embody law, and the rule of reason, justice and mercy.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet