A very happy centennial birthday to the late great master of scifi, Robert Anson Heinlein!

Robert Anson Heinlein
7/7/1907—5/8/1988

Heinlein is by far my favorite classical scifi author. What follows are some of my own favorite quotes - unfortunately, due to space constraints, I'll have to leave out basically the entirety of the Notebooks of Lazarus Long (click that link!), but you should get the picture.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." --Robert Heinlein (as Lazarus Long), Time Enough For Love

"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life." --Robert Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon

"A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame ... as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world ... aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure." --Robert Heinlein (as Professor Bernardo de la Paz), The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

"I am an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman- which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch when it suits me." --Robert Heinlein (as Jubal Harshaw), Stranger in a Strange Land

"Of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to, every time. If it pains them, to make a choice- if the 'choice' looks like a 'sacrifice' -- you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness... the necessity of having to decide between two things you want when you can't have both. The ordinary bloke suffers every time he chooses between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids, between getting up to go to work and losing his job. But he always chooses that which hurts least or pleasures most. The scoundrel and the saint make the same choices...." --Robert Heinlein (as Jubal Harshaw), Stranger in a Strange Land

"No matter how lavishly overpaid, civil servants everywhere are convinced they are horribly underpaid-but all public employees have larceny in their hearts or they wouldn't be feeding at the public trough." --Robert Heinlein (as Friday), Friday

"'Love' is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." --Robert Heinlein (as Jubal Harshaw), Stranger in a Strange Land

And above all things...

TANSTAAFL!

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
A thanks for the reminder to Amy Sturgis from Liberty & Power. Check out her post

Tags: books, events, heinlein, history, holidays, people, quotes
Current Mood: thoughtful

Okay, these are two totally unrelated topics, but I'm going to merge them into one post.  Madness!

First:

HAPPY PI DAY!

(photo stolen from a random Flickr person)

Be sure to have a slice today in celebration - after calculating its circumference and area.

Second:  I've seen this meme going around for a very long time, so I decided to finally participate. Under the cut, you will find a list of "The most significant SF & Fantasy books of the last 50 years (1953-2002)", courtesy of Backseat Driving. I've bolded the ones I've read and italicized the ones I own but have not finished yet.

( Read more... )

Looks like by this guy's criteria I have a lot of reading left to do.  Oh well.  I've already got my own list to get through first.  Are there any of these in particular that I should add to it?  I bought Le Guin's The Dispossessed recently, and if I like it I'll probably also read The Left Hand of Darkness.

Tags: books, math
Current Mood: geeky

Last Updated: 2006-01-10 10:53:45 PST

Books I want to read/am reading/need to finish reading:

• Aquinas, Thomas - Summa Theologica
• Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics
• Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Game
• Friedman, David - The Machinery of Freedom
• Hayek, Friedrich - The Road to Serfdom
• Heinlein, Robert - Time Enough for Love and Friday
• Hitler, Adolf - Mein Kampf
• Hobbes, Thomas -Leviathan
• Hofstadter, Douglas - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• Kant, Immanuel - Critique of Pure Reason and Logic
• LeFevre, Robert - this bread is mine
• Marx, Karl - Das Kapital
• Mises, Ludwig von - Socialism and Human Action
• Nozick, Robert - Anarchy, State, and Utopia
• Pirsig, Robert M. - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph - What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government
• Rand, Ayn - Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead
• Rothbard, Murray - Man, Economy and State
• Smith, L. Neil - The Probability Broach
• Spooner, Lysander - No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
• Stephenson, Neal - The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and "The Baroque Cycle"
• Vinge, Vernor - A Deepness In The Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep
• Wilson, Robert Anton and Shea, Robert - The Illuminatus! Trilogy
• Zamyatin, Yevgeny - We

I'm going to try to update this list as I finish books or find new ones.  This list is by no means exhaustive yet.

If you have suggestions, post them in the comments and I will add them if I am interested.

Tags: books, life
Current Mood: busy