This I Believe by Robert Heinlein [Archive]

Dennis G

07-12-2003, 03:04 AM

Just thought I Would Post it.

--| Robert Heinlein - This I Believe |-----

I am not going to talk about religious beliefs but about matters so obvious
that it has gone out of style to mention them. I believe in my neighbours.
I know their faults, and I know that their virtues far outweigh their faults.

Take Father Michael down our road a piece. I'm not of his creed, but I know that goodness and charity and lovingkindness shine in his daily actions. I believe in Father Mike. If I'm in trouble, I'll go to him.

My next-door neighbour is a vetrinary doctor. Doc will get out of bed after
a hard day to help a stay cat. No fee--no prospect of a fee--I believe in Doc.

I believe in my townspeople. You can knock on any door in our town saying, 'I'm hungry,' and you will be fed. Our town is no exception. I've found the same ready charity everywhere. But for the one who says, 'To heck with you-- I got mine,' there are a hundred, a thousand who will say, 'Sure, pal, sit down.'

I know that despite all warnings against hitchikers I can step to the highway, thumb for a ride, and in a few minutes a car or a truck will stop and someone will say, 'Climb in, Mac--how far you going?'

I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime, yet
for every criminal there are 10,000 honest, decent, kindly men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up. Buisness could not go on from day to day. Decency is not news. It is buried in the obituaries, but it is a force stronger than crime. I believe in the patient gallantry of nurses and the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that goes on quietly in almost every home in the land.

I believe in the honest craft of workmen. Take a look around you. There were never enough bosses to check up on all that work. From Independence Hall to the Grand Coulee Dam, these things were built level and square by craftsmen who were honest in their bones.

I believe that almost all politicians are honest... there are hundreds of
politicians, low paid or not paid at all, doing their level best without thanks
or glory to make our system work. If this were not true we would never have gotten past the thirteen colonies.

I believe in Roger Young. You and I are free today because of endless unnamed heros from Valley Forge to the Yalu River. I believe in--I am proud to belong to--the United States. Despite shortcomings from lynchings to bad faith in high places, our nation has had the most decent and kindly internal practices and foreign policies to be found anywhere in history.

And finally, I believe in my whole race. Yellow, white, black, red, brown. In the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability, and goodness of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being. I believe that we have come this far only by the skin of our teeth. That we always make it just by the skin of our teeth, but that we will always make it. Survive. Endure. I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes, will endure longer than his home planet--will spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency.

This I believe with all my heart.

Robert A. Heinlein.

Dennis G

07-12-2003, 11:04 PM

You can Find a lot good quotes from Robert A. Heinlein

(1) Most people are basically honest, kind and decent.

(2) The American people are wise enough to run their own affairs. The do not need Fuehrers, Strong Men, Technocrats, Commissars, Silver Shirts, Theocrats, or any other sort of dictator.

(3) Americans have a compatible community of ambitions. Most of them don't want to be rich but do want enough economic security to permit them to raise families in decent comfort without fear of the future. They want the least government necessary to this purpose and don't greatly mind what the other fellow does as long as it does not interfere with them living their own lives. As a people we are neither money mad nor prying. We are easy-going and anarchistic. We may want to keep up with the Joneses -- but not with the Vanderbilts. We don't like cops.

(4) Democracy is not an automatic condition resulting from laws and constitutions. It is a living, dynamic process which must be worked at by you yourself -- or it ceases to be democracy, even if the shell and form remains.

(5) One way or another, any government which remains in power is a representative government. If your city government is a crooked machine, then it is because you and your neighbors prefer it that way -- prefer it to the effort of running your own affairs. Hitler's government was a popular government; the vast majority of Germans preferred the rule of gangsters to the effort of thinking and doing for themselves. They abdicated their franchise.

(6) Democracy is the most efficient form of government ever invented by the human race. On the record, it has worked better in peace and in war than fascism, communism, or any other form of dictatorship. As for the mythical yardstick of 'benevolent' monarchy or dictatorship -- there ain't no such animal!

(7) A single citizen, with no political connections and no money, can be extremely effective in politics.

The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war's desolation.

War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing... but controlled and purposeful violence.

But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how - or why - he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people - 'older and wiser heads,' as they say - supply the control. Which is as it should be.

War is an applied science, with well-defined principle tested in histroy; analogous solutions may be found from ballista to H-bomb. But every revolution is a freak, a mutant, a monstrosity, its conditions never to be repeated and its operations carried out by amateurs and individualists.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed 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.

Jenkins said, But that is impossible, Professor. You aren't built to observe two time dimensions.

Easy , there... answered Frost. I am built to percieve them one at a time - and so are you. I'll tell you about it, but before I do so, I must explain the theory of time I was forced to evolve in order to account for my experience. Most people think of time as a track that they run on from birth to death as inexorably as a train follows its rails - they feel instinctively that time follows a straight line, the past lying behind, the future lying in front. Now I have reason to believe - to know - that time is analagous to a surface rather than a line, and a rolling hilly surface at that. Think of this track we follow over the surface of time as a winding road cut through hill. Every little way the road branches and the branches follow side canyons. At these branches the crucial decisions of your life take place. You can turn right or loft into entirely different futures. Occasionally there is a switchback where one can scramble up or down a bank and skip over a few thousand or million years - if you don't have your eyes so fixed on the road that you miss the short-cut...

...if you have the necessary intellectual
strength and courage, you may leave the roads, or paths of high probability, and strike out over the hills of possible time, cutting through the roads as you come to them, following them for a little while, even following them backwards, with the past ahead of you, and the future behind you. Or you might roam around the hilltops doing nothing but the extremely improbable. I cannot imagine what it would be like - perhaps a bit like Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass.

Ah, yes, the 'unalienable rights.' Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What 'right' to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What 'right' to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of 'right'? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man's right is 'unalienable'? And is it 'right'?

As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. 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.

Do-gooding is like treating hemophilia -- the real cure is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death... before they breed more hemophiliacs.

I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces--with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way the government sticks its nose into everything, now.

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped ,or turned back, for their private benefit.

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 efforts will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failiure.

For the first time in my life, I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet's censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy...censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked, contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything---you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.