Methuselah's Children

When it don’t rain, the roof don’t leak; when it rains, I can’t fix it nohow.

was no such thing as a “dangerous weapon,” there were only dangerous men.

That’s what I was trying to find out when we were rushed off on this damned safari. They have unusual intestinal flora and it may have something to do with that. But I think it has to do with the fact that they never stop growing.

It’s not that easy. You can make omelet from eggs, but not eggs from omelet.

Correct or not, he felt himself to be a useless pensioner, an impotent object of charity.

Life is short, but the years are long.

light-months—and it was now possible to infer by parainterferometric methods that the star (ZD9817, or simply “our” star) had planets of some sort.

A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.

Any custom is man-made and is therefore a finite attempt to describe an infinity of relationships. It follows as the night from day that any custom necessarily has its exceptions.

It is contrary to our customs to permit scientific knowledge to be held as a monopoly for the few. When concealing such knowledge strikes at life itself, the action becomes treason to the race.

Citizens are urged to tolerate cheerfully any minor inconvenience this may cause them; your right of privacy will be respected in every way possible; your right of free movement may be interrupted temporarily, but full economic restitution will be made.

Whenever the citizens fix their attention on one issue to the exclusion of others, the situation is ripe for scalawags, demagogues, ambitious men on horseback.