Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily.  — Time Enough For Love

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. — Time Enough For Love

There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe. — Have Space Suit – Will Travel

Life is short.
But the years are long.
Not while the evil days come not.

— Methuselah’s Children

The future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands…with tools…with horse sense and science and engineering. — The Door Into Summer

And finally, I believe in my whole race. Yellow, white, black, red, brown — in the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability … and goodness … .of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being.  — This I Believe (1952)

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. —   If This Goes On (1940)

I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand‘s; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces — with the other matters handled otherwise. I’m sick of the way the government sticks its nose into everything, now.

• The Robert Heinlein Interview, and other Heinleiniana (1990) by J. Neil Schulman

I’m going to try to do something different.  I’m going to go 30 days at a time of doing quotes from authors, orators, or poets.  I’ll be drawing from books, video and audio recordings, and websites.

We’ll start with my favorite author, Robert Heinlein.

The death rate is the same for us as for anybody … one person, one death, sooner or later.

• Tunnel in the Sky (1955)