# Starship Troopers  ## Metadata - Author: [[Robert A. Heinlein]] - Full Title: Starship Troopers - Category: #sci-fi ## Highlights - Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.” ([Location 463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=463)) - 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. ([Location 1002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=1002)) - The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation. ([Location 1424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=1424)) - “Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet. ([Location 1442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=1442)) - “Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.” ([Location 1463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=1463)) - The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion . . . and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself—ultimate cost for perfect value.” ([Location 1475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=1475)) - 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. ([Location 1845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=1845)) - The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’ . . . and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.” ([Location 1855](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=1855)) - “Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part . . . and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.” ([Location 2476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=2476)) - let the intelligent elite run things and you’ll have utopia. It fell flat on its foolish face of course. Because the pursuit of science, despite its social benefits, is itself not a social virtue; its practitioners can be men so self-centered as to be lacking in social responsibility. ([Location 2743](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=2743)) - Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. ([Location 2776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=2776)) - To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. ([Location 2788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=2788)) - Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination—devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues—which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out. ([Location 2809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=2809)) - Morals—all correct moral rules—derive from the instinct to survive; moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level—as in a father who dies to save his children. But since population pressure results from the process of surviving through others, then war, because it results from population pressure, derives from the same inherited instinct which produces all moral rules suitable for human beings. ([Location 2817](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004EYTK2C&location=2817))