# My First Book Robert Heilen



## Montana Rancher (Mar 4, 2013)

I started reading Robert when I was about 14, "Have Spaceship Will Travel" and have been hooked ever since.

If you want to read a real prophet, try this author from 1959....

Anyway he wrote a book called starship troopers (not sure if the movie is based on his book) but here are a few quotes I like the most.

"Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more."

"There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men."

"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor."

"Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost."

"Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this?--TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out.
Poor arithmetic, but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature--a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price."

"Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don't walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don't know how to describe it, but it's much more complex and utterly delightful. They don't move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions . . . and all of it graceful."

"Any group is weaker than a man alone unless they are perfectly trained to work together."

"To permit irresponsible authority is to sell disaster."

"The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. . . . A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive--and nowhere else!--and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race . . . .
The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual."

"Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination-- devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues -- which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out."

"Cast me into a dungeon;, burn me at the state, crown me king of kings, I can 'pursue happiness' as long as my brain lives -- but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it."

"Let's skip [Mobile Infantry] tradition for a moment. Can you think of anything sillier than being fired out of a spaceship with nothing but mayhem and sudden death at the other end? However, if someone must do this idiotic stunt, do you know a surer way to keep a man keyed up to the point where he is willing than by keeping him constantly reminded that the only good reason why men fight is a living, breathing reality?
"In a mixed ship [men and women] the last thing a trooper hears before a drop (maybe the last word he ever hears) is a woman's voice, wishing him luck. If you don't think this is important you've probably resigned from the human race."

"But if you didn't have more urgent things to do after supper [in boot camp], you could write a letter, loaf, gossip, discuss the myriad mental shortcomings of sergeants and, dearest of all, talk about the female of the species (we became convinced that there was no such creatures, just mythology created by inflamed imaginations - one boy in our company claimed to have seen a girl, over at regimental headquarters; he was unanimously judged a liar and a braggart)."

"Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind."

"Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage."

"We learned not to waste ammo even on warriors except in self-protection"

"Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins."

"But, do you know, once you get used to it's rather cute. I mean, if a girl looks alright to start with, she still looks alright with her head smooth."

"A boy who gets a C- in 'Appreciation of Television' can't be all bad."

"You got the impression that he never needed to sleep - just ten-thousand-mile checkups and dust him off occasionally."

"Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more. All the wealthy, unhappy people you're ever met take sleeping pills; Mobile Infantrymen don't need them. Give a cap trooper a bunk and time to sack out in it and he's as happy as a worm in an apple - asleep."

"Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part...and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live."

I have quoted other thing from my friend "Rob" for years, I was happy to find these jewels.


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## Montana Rancher (Mar 4, 2013)

Ok, from the "Have Space suit Will Travel Book

“"Find out what you want to do, then do it. Never talk yourself into doing something you don't want."”

“"There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe."”

“"the more you learn, the more you need to learn."”

‘good luck’ follows careful preparation; ‘bad luck’ comes from sloppiness.

Find out what you want to do, then do it. Never talk yourself into doing something you don’t want.

“There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.

To what extent civilization is retarded by the laughing jackasses, the empty-minded belitters?

But I don’t hold with the idea that to understand all is to forgive all; you follow that and first thing you know you’re sentimental over murderers and rapists and kidnappers and forgetting their victims. That’s wrong. I’ll weep over the likes of Peewee, not over criminals whose victims they are.

don’t plead with it to be a good little spider and please stop poisoning people. A black widow spider can’t help it—but that’s the point.

We’re simply trying to survive—and the first principle of survival is not to worry about the impossible and concentrate on what’s possible.

“Some people insist that ‘mediocre’ is better than ‘best.’ They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can’t fly. They despise brains because they have none. Pfah!”

You’re in bad shape when your emotions force you into acts which you know are foolish.



Seriously not only are the great stories but not bad for a book written in 1958.


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## Nathan Jefferson (May 11, 2013)

He truly was a man before his times! Not only are his books quotable but he is as well, I know I've read hundreds of quotes from interviews/essays he's written.


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