Heinlein's story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised on Mars who comes “home” to an Earth he can't make sense of, won the 1962 Hugo Award and became a touchstone of the 1960s. Much of its wisdom, and most of its mischief, comes from the cranky old writer and lawyer Jubal Harshaw. These are the lines that stayed with me.
grok
The Martian word Heinlein invented for understanding something so completely that you become part of it. It caught on, and it's in the dictionary today.
On Love
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy — in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.
All human behavior, all human motivations, all man's hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind's tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.
On Wisdom and Human Nature
But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.
I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth — then shut up.
A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom.
I never do anything I don't want to do. Nor does anyone, but in my case I am always aware of it.
Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.
I used to think I was serving humanity … and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.
On God and Faith
Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness.
Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit.
I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith — it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.
If God existed and if He desired to be worshiped, then it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense that believers offered Him as worship.
No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own … and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing … is one that they can't or won't entertain.
Submission to God's will is not to be a robot, incapable of choice and thus of sin. Submission can include — DOES include — utter responsibility for the fashion in which I and others shape the universe. It is ours to turn into a heavenly garden or to rend and destroy.
On Art and Government
Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce — render emotional — his audience, each time.
Support for the arts — merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!
Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.
“Thou art God.”
“It's not a message of cheer and hope. It's a defiance — and an unafraid, unabashed assumption of personal responsibility.”
Heinlein's Martian shares a table with two other unlikely prophets in Three Guys Walk Into a Gestalt on River of Dreams.
Quotations from Robert A. Heinlein,
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). Page design with AI assistance — in keeping with my published
AI Collaboration Manifesto.