The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that overcrowding leads to societal issues, and space travel offers an escape to avoid these problems.
Robert A. Heinlein highlights the relationship between societal overcrowding and the potential for social collapse. He expresses a concern for the detrimental effects of human congestion and advocates for exploration beyond our planet as a means to alleviate such pressures and find new opportunities for humanity.
Themes
CrowdingSocietySpace TravelExplorationCollapse
In practice
Example use cases
This quote is perfect for a discussion on urban overpopulation and its implications.
More from Robert A. Heinlein
All quotes →An armed society is a polite society.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
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.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
Similar quotes
A “collective” mind does not exist. It is merely the sum of endless numbers of individual minds. If we have an endless number of individual minds who are weak, meek, submissive and impotent – who renounce their creative supremacy for the sake of the “whole” and accept humbly that the “whole’s” verdict – we don’t get a collective super-brain. We get only the weak, meek, submissive and impotent collective mind.
Ayn RandRead
Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect society which does not protect me -- indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm -- and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt.
Alexandre DumasRead
Tradition, long conditioned thinking, can bring about a fixation, a concept that one readily accepts, perhaps not with a great deal of thought.
Jiddu KrishnamurtiRead
One must be deeply aware of the impermanence of the world.
DogenRead
'It is my duty to warn you that it will be used against you,' cried the Inspector, with the magnificent fair play of the British criminal law.
Arthur Conan DoyleRead
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
David Foster WallaceRead