Robert A. Heinlein - To Sail Beyond the Sunset

But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously — after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Friedrich Nietzsche

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Optimus Prime

Fate rarely calls upon us at a moment of our choosing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Abraham Lincoln

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

Tom Robbins

We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.