Robert A. Heinlein Law Quotations

Whether the authorities be invaders or merely local tyrants, the effect of such [gun control] laws is to place the individual at the mercy of the state, unable to resist.

Wisdom includes not getting angry unnecessarily. The Law ignores trifles and the wise man does, too.

Straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in all law schools.

Morals — all correct moral laws — derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

Daughters can spend ten percent more than a man can make in any usual occupation. That’s a law of nature, to be known henceforth as ‘Harshaw’s Law.

The only thing privacy laws accomplish is making the bugs smaller.

Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up.

...I am opposed to all attempts to license or restrict the arming of individuals... I consider such laws a violation of civil liberty, subversive of democratic political institutions, and self-defeating in their purpose.

Every law that was ever written opened up a new way to graft.

By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen.

No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law.

A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.

Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

My old man claimed that the more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels.

It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can't be enforced weakens all other laws.