Best 50 quotes of Spider Robinson on MyQuotes

And I'm a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?

And I repeat: if there is anything that can divert the land of my birth from its current stampede into the Stone Age, it is the widespread dissemination of the thoughts and perceptions that Robert Heinlein has been selling as entertainment since 1939.

Dreams should be forgotten when we wake. Or one day we will find ourselves unable to sleep.

God is an iron... and that's a hot one.

If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.

If you've lived a bad life, they send you to Hell. But if you've been truly wicked, they give you a tour of Heaven first.

...I know good design when I fail to trip over it.

I'm going to live forever, or die trying !

In 1971, after seven years in college, with that magic piece of paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, N.Y. guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American educational system!

Information can't be put in any container that isn't leaky.

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?

It took me better than a quarter century to learn, the hard way, that hard work at something you want to be doing is the most fun that you can have out of bed . . . to learn that the smart man finds ways to make everything he does be work; to learn that "leisure" time is truly pleasurable (indeed tolerable) only to the extent that is its subconscious grazing for information with which to infuse newer, better work.

Just as there are laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.

Librarians are like crack dealers when it comes to hooking small children.

Librarians are the secret masters of the world. They control information. Don't ever piss one off.

Mankind is divided into two basic sorts: those who find the unknown future threatening ... and those who find it thrilling. The rupture between those two sides has been responsible for most of the bloodshed in history.

Man, you're no smarter than me. You're just a fancier kind of stupid.

Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak human, not the other way around.

Now that I finally have the time for it, this web surfing stuff turns out to be as interesting and fun and addictive as you've all been telling me. Zipping from link to link, chasing an idea across the noosphere, sucking up information like a killer whale - way cool.

Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.

Quite frankly, I don't like you humans. After what you all have done, I find being 'inhuman' a compliment.

Sexual intercourse vests no property rights.

Some guys step on a rake in the dark, and get mad and go punch somebody. Others step on a rake in the dark and fall down laughing at themselves. I know which kind of guy I'd rather be. So do my friends.

Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile.

The day Apollo 11 landed, I knew men would walk on Mars in my lifetime. I'm no longer nearly so sure. The last budget put forward in Canada contained not a penny for Mars.

The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.

The problems of today's youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.

there's nothing in the human heart or mind, no place no matter how twisted or secret, that can't be endured - if you have someone to share it with.

The whole world turns upside down in ten years, but you turn upside down with it.

This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving -- and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist.

To be human : to strive in the face of the certainty of failure.

We are all time travelers moving at the speed of exactly 60 minutes per hour.

We did make use, from time to time, of candles, neckties, scarves, shoelaces, a little water-color paintbrush, her hairbrush, butter, whipped cream, strawberry jam, Johnson’s Baby Oil, my Swedish hand vibrator, a fascinating bead necklace she had, miscellaneous common household items, and every molecule of flesh that was exposed to air or could be located with strenuous search.

When writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence...in love, never settle...value yourself first and this will help you to value others...life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest...everyone in the world is different, and that's ok.

You become uneasy with people in direct proportion to how many lies you have to keep track of in their presence.

You know what gives me the courage to keep on living? The courage to love myself a little? It's having a whole bunch of friends who really give a goddamn. When you share pain, there's less of it, and when you share joy, there's more of it.

Annie clouded up. For a second, he thought she was going to erupt, and flinched. She saw that...and got control of herself with an visible effort. She took three deep breaths, each longer than the last, and her features became serene. All at once it seemed totally clear to Mike that she was right and he was nuts - that his ingenius theory was nonsense, childish, fantasty bullshit. His conviction evaporated, and he was ashamed. He felt his cheeks grow hot, groped for words with which to backtrack - "I have to admit I have no better explanation for the the facts," Annie said slowly. Again, Mike did an emotional instant 180. "Holy shit -" She held up a hand. "I am going to think now. Very hard, for a long time. You will be as quiet as possible while I do." She got up from the computer, went to the bed, and lay down. "Think yourself, or read, or play games with the headphones on, or go Topside if you like." She clasped her hands on her belly, closed her eyes and appeared to go to sleep

A surprising percentage of your own society, with all your heritage of murder, would like to believe that Life survives by going to the supermarket. So the ideal would be to train cattle to make butcher knives and take turns cutting each other up at a convenient location.

Callahan dried his big meaty hands on his apron and cleared his throat with a sound like a bulldozer in pain.

Certainly, all of us at Callahan's were heir to the tradition of the B-movie — and the A-movie for that matter — that any female who enters your life in a dramatic manner must be your fated love.

He smiled like a sun lamp.

Hey Jake. I got an idea.' 'Be gentle with it,' the Doc grinned. 'It's in a strange place.

I think of us as a people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its very nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it's done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away.

It's a rare hurt that can stand under the advice, help, and sympathy generated by upwards of thirty people that care. Callahan loses a lot of his regulars. After they've been coming around long enough, they find they don't need to drink any more.

Progress is something with no pity, and no purpose. It just happens. It chews up all you ever knew, and spits out things you can't understand, and the only value it seems to have is to make a few people a lot of money.

The expense of eating is, in great part, the resistance the second life offers to being eaten.

There's a price for absolution on this planet, and it's called penance.

Well, some men learn by listening, some read, some observe and analyze — and some of us just have to pee on the electric fence.

What shocked us the most was that we had no idea why we should be so shocked. Like opening a ginger ale and finding Jamesons' inside: nothing wrong with it, but it sort of takes you by surprise.

Your diet must be about fifty-fifty, carrots and locoweed," Annie said softly. He froze. "I can't figure out what in the name of God's labia majora you think you're doing...but I'm impressed by how well you're doing it in the dark. You must have eyes like a cat.