Politics & Power Quote by Robert A. Heinlein

Heinlein doesn’t bother with the polite fiction that censorship is a rare emergency tool; he frames it as a diagnostic test for whether an institution is sliding into coercion. The phrasing is doing a lot of work. “Any government, or any church for that matter” is a deliberate pairing: two kinds of authority that claim different justifications (public safety vs. moral salvation) but often reach for the same lever - control of information. By calling people “subjects,” not citizens or congregants, he quietly strips away the flattering language of participation and consent. If someone can tell you what you may not read, you’re already being ruled.

The quote’s engine is its refusal to grant good intentions a moral alibi. “No matter how holy the motives” anticipates the most common defense of repression: we’re protecting you, we’re protecting the children, we’re protecting the soul of the nation. Heinlein, a mid-century libertarian-minded science fiction writer shaped by wartime propaganda, Cold War loyalty tests, and the cultural policing of obscenity laws, understood how easily “protection” becomes a narrative shield for power. His science fiction regularly dramatized societies where control is rationalized as virtue.

Subtextually, this is a warning about the seductive efficiency of paternalism. Once an authority claims the right to decide what knowledge is permissible, it doesn’t just block a book or a film; it trains the public to outsource judgment. Heinlein’s line lands because it treats censorship not as a policy dispute but as a structural switch: flip it on, and whatever the stated purpose, you’ve chosen tyranny’s operating system.