Top 50 Joe Haldeman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Rationalism doesn’t require “belief,” only observation. The real, measurable world doesn’t care what you believe.”

— Joe Haldeman

2. “Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.”

— Joe Haldeman

3. “All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you’re writing about typing.”

— Joe Haldeman

4. “The worst advice a young writer can get is “Write what you know.” Imagination is more important than experience.”

— Joe Haldeman

5. “Writer’s block? Don’t worry about it. Either it goes away or you die.”

— Joe Haldeman

6. “Think of it as a parallel universe. But maybe it’s the real one, and we’re in a dream.”

— Joe Haldeman

7. “Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.”

— Joe Haldeman

8. “Marianne, how’s your statistics?” “Math is my worst subject.” “But you can program?” “Of course. I’m not illiterate.”

— Joe Haldeman

9. “Science fiction as a genre has the benefit of being able to act as parable, to set up a story at a remove so you can make a real-world point without people throwing up a wall in front of it.”

— Joe Haldeman

10. “Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.”

— Joe Haldeman

11. “It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don’t like sneaky little animals.”

— Joe Haldeman

12. “But they weren’t aliens, I had to remind myself – we were.”

— Joe Haldeman

13. “A square meter of earth, Dostoevski said; if all you had was a square meter of earth to stand on, and nothing around you but impenetrable fog, living would be preferable to dying.”

— Joe Haldeman

14. “You couldn’t blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans’ having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored. The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it. The.”

— Joe Haldeman

15. “So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.”

— Joe Haldeman

16. “Unele rani sunt prea mari pentru a fi cusute. Trebuie sa le lasi deschise si sa le protejezi pana ce peste ele creste alta piele. Dar noua piele nu are terminatii nervoase normale, te tine in viata, dar amortit.”

— Joe Haldeman

17. “I never found anybody else and I don’t want anybody else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.”

— Joe Haldeman

18. “Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust.”

— Joe Haldeman

19. “There’s no such thing as writing about the future. The future hasn’t happened yet.”

— Joe Haldeman

20. “Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.”

— Joe Haldeman

21. “War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained.”

— Joe Haldeman

22. “Don’t ‘write what you know.’ Make up something new!”

— Joe Haldeman

23. “A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.”

— Joe Haldeman

24. “Well, there’s always Nevada,” Benny said. “You can buy anything from a hand laser to an atom bomb there.”

— Joe Haldeman

25. “That meant that he’d drunk too much too early, and had popped an Alcoterm to burn it off.”

— Joe Haldeman

26. “Some are born crazy,” Amelia said. “Some achieve craziness. We had craziness thrust upon us.”

— Joe Haldeman

27. “I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth.”

— Joe Haldeman

28. “The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.”

— Joe Haldeman

29. “We had just herded them up and slaughtered them, the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species.”

— Joe Haldeman

30. “My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor’s credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint.”

— Joe Haldeman

31. “We’re headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid.” New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artifacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.”

— Joe Haldeman

32. “She said she promised her mother that she would never drink a drop of wine. That was the drop she never drank.”

— Joe Haldeman

33. “One rash person in the right place and earth could be a sterile cinder in seconds, but that’s been more-or-less true for a century.”

— Joe Haldeman

34. “Bad books on writing tell you to ‘write what you know’, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”

— Joe Haldeman

35. “I called to the waiter, ‘bring me one of those Antares things.’ Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.”

— Joe Haldeman

36. “Politicians cover their mistakes with money; cooks cover their mistakes with mayonnaise; doctors cover theirs with dirt.”

— Joe Haldeman

37. “I tried to get through to my brother, Mike, on the Moon, but the phone company wouldn’t let me place the call until I had signed a contract and posted a $25,000 bond.”

— Joe Haldeman

38. “I watched her walk away and thought that if anybody could make a fighting suit look sexy, it’d be Sean. But even she couldn’t.”

— Joe Haldeman

39. “People had written about that, warfare based on attrition of wealth rather than loss of life. But it’s always been easier to make new lives than new wealth.”

— Joe Haldeman

40. “But I remember another image from Earth: the rich dark green grass that grew in graveyards.”

— Joe Haldeman

41. “But I decided that buying the gift was more for me than for her, anyhow. A commercial kind of substitute for prayer.”

— Joe Haldeman

42. “Florida and half of Georgia comprised a trigger-happy xenophobic lunatic asylum.”

— Joe Haldeman

43. “Anyone who sees clearly sees chaos everywhere. Art is a way of temporarily setting order to confusion. Temporary and incomplete; that’s why we never run out of new art. Anyone who comes to the tools of art without that sense of confusion is an invader.”

— Joe Haldeman

44. “I have a radical thought,” Meryl said. “Instead of heading for the hills with guns, why don’t we try to find something like the Red Cross, and volunteer. Try to do something constructive.”

— Joe Haldeman

45. “There may or may not be a God, but if there is one, I wouldn’t want to have him over for dinner.”

— Joe Haldeman

46. “Have you had your first baby yet? I might have one myself, once they find a way for the man to carry it around the first nine months.”

— Joe Haldeman

47. “This world was no place for anyone with access to another.”

— Joe Haldeman

48. “Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction.”

— Joe Haldeman

49. “I was too old-fashioned male-chauv to allow that; we discussed for a minute and I wound up with the couch.”

— Joe Haldeman

50. “Don’t worry about that, Man, just make out my ticket.”

— Joe Haldeman