Douglas Adams quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Douglas Adams has a lot to say. In this list we present the 303 best Douglas Adams quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
(And check out our page with Douglas Adams quotes per category if you only want to read quotes from a certain category, such as funny, life, love, politics, and more).
Douglas Adams quotes
There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
This must be Thursday, ‘ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Life… is like a grapefruit. Well, it’s sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Exactly!” said Deep Thought. “So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. “I will go mad!” he annouced.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus
Life is wasted on the living.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Can’t stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I’ll tell them what to do. Don’t get bitten in the first place. (quoting Dr. Struan Sutherland)
— Douglas Adams
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
The story so far:In the beginning the Universe was created.This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer
— Douglas Adams
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
The Guide says there is an art to flying”, said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Don’t Panic.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
So this is it, ” said Arthur, “We are going to die.””Yes, ” said Ford, “except… no! Wait a minute!” He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision. “What’s this switch?” he cried.”What? Where?” cried Arthur, twisting round.”No, I was only fooling, ” said Ford, “we are going to die after all.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.
— Douglas Adams
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me ‘Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid’ – then I can’t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.
— Douglas Adams
What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can’t move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn’t been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won’t be troubling you much longer.
— Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts
My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
If I ever meet myself, ‘ said Zaphod, ‘I’ll hit myself so hard I won’t know what’s hit me.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
— Douglas Adams
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Arthur: If I asked you where the hell we were, would I regret it?Ford: We’re safe.Arthur: Oh good.Ford: We’re in a small galley cabin in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet. that I wasn’t previously aware of.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was.”Is there any tea on this spaceship?” he asked.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it, ” said Marvin.”And what happened?” pressed Ford.”It committed suicide, ” said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in “It’s a nice day, ” or “You’re very tall, ” or “So this is it, we’re going to die.”His first theory was that if human beings didn’t keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up.After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this–“If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?
— Douglas Adams
I have detected disturbances in the wash.”The wash?”The space-time wash.”Are we talking about some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?”Eddies in the space-time continuum.”Ah…is he. Is he.”What?”Er, who is Eddy, then, exactly?
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Ow! My brains!
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying “Blood…blood…blood…blood…
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Why?’ is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are when someone asks you ‘What’s the time?’ or ‘When was the battle of 1066?’ or ‘How do these seatbelts work that go tight when you slam the brakes on, Daddy?’ The answers are easy and are, respectively, ‘Seven-thirty in the evening, ‘ ‘Ten-fifteen in the morning, ‘ and ‘Don’t ask stupid questions.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Shee, you guys are so unhip it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
What’s up?” [asked Ford.]”I don’t know, ” said Marvin, “I’ve never been there.
— Douglas Adams
The first ten million years were the worst, ” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Having solved all the major mathematical, physical, chemical, biological, sociological, philosophical, etymological, meteorological and psychological problems of the Universe except for his own, three times over, [Marvin] was severely stuck for something to do, and had taken up composing short dolorous ditties of no tone, or indeed tune. The latest one was a lullaby.Marvin droned, Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won’t engulf my head, I can see in infrared, He paused to gather the artistic and emotional strength to tackle the next verse.Now I lay me down to sleep, Try to count electric sheep, Sweet dream wishes you can keep
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
My capacity for happiness, ” he added, “you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition ofthe word “Infinite”.Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some.Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, atotally stunning size, “wow, that’s big”, time. Infinity is just sobig that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy.Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringlyhuge is the sort of concept we’re trying to get across here.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.
— Douglas Adams
Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”(Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
And so the Universe ended.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
So, the world is fine. We don’t have to save the world—the world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about, is whether or not the world we live in, will be capable of sustaining us in it. That’s what we need to think about.
— Douglas Adams
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist, ‘” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.””But, ” says Man, “The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.””Oh dear, ” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that, ” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.”Oh, that was easy, ” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
God’s Final Message to His Creation:’We apologize for the inconvenience.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting “Gotcha”. It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.”Why not?”Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I’d far rather be happy than right any day.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn’t a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board.Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees. However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Brontë piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
But unless we determine to take action, ‘ said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, ‘then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care about that?’ ‘Not enough to want to get killed over it, ‘ said Ford.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
They found a coin and helped him to the telescope. He complained and insulted them, but they helped him look at each individual letter in turn. The first letter was a ‘w, ‘ the second an ‘e.’ Then there was a gap. An ‘a’ followed, then a ‘p, ‘ an ‘o, ‘ and an ‘l.’Marvin paused for a rest.After a few moments they resumed and let him see the ‘o, ‘ the ‘g, ‘ the ‘i, ‘ the ‘z, ‘ and the ‘e.’The next two words were ‘for’ and ‘the.’ The last one was a long one, and Marvin needed another rest before the could tackle it.It started with ‘i, ‘ then ‘n, ‘ then ‘c.’ Next came an ‘o’ and an ‘n, ‘ followed by a ‘v, ‘ an ‘e, ‘ another ‘n, ‘ and an ‘i.’After a final pause, Marvin gathered his strength for the last stretch.He read the ‘e, ‘ the ‘n, ‘ the ‘c, ‘ and at last the final ‘e, ‘ and staggered back into their arms.’I think, ‘ he murmured at last from deep within his corroding, rattling thorax, ‘I feel good about it.’The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time ever.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
In the center lay the exploded carcass of a lonely sperm whale that hadn’t lived long enough to be disappointed with its lot.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!
— Douglas Adams
I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.
— Douglas Adams
The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist, ” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Religion… has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever… If someone votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I must [not] move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’… Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.
— Douglas Adams
Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
He had seen the whole Universe stretching to infinity around him—everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he was the most important thing in it. Having a conceited ego is one thing. Actually being told by a machine is another.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.””Ah, well, I’m not sure I believe that.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is…42!
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Arthur shook his head and sat down. He looked up.“I thought you must be dead …” he said simply.“So did I for a while, ” said Ford, “and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Stomp stomp. Whirr. Pleased to be of service.Shut up.Thank you.Stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp. Whirr. Thank you for making a simple door very happy.Hope your diodes rot.Thank you. Have a nice day.Stomp stomp stomp stomp. Whirr. It is my pleasure to open for you…Zark off….and my satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.I said zark off.Thank you for listening to this message.
— Douglas Adams
Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious.Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry. He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her.“Why’s this fish so bloody good?” he demanded, angrily.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
He sniggered.He didn’t like to think of himself as the sort of person who giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
We already have the Wooden Pillar, the Steel Pillar and the Plastic Pillar. In a moment we will have the Golden Bail….’No, you won’t.’We will, ‘ stated the robot simply.No, you won’t. It makes my ship work.’In a moment, ‘ repeated the robot patiently, ‘we will have the Golden Bail….’You will not, ‘ said Zaphod.And then we must go, ‘ said the robot, in all seriousness, ‘to a party.’Oh, ‘ said Zaphod, startled, ‘can I come?’No, ‘ said the robot, ‘we are going to shoot you.’Oh, yeah?’ said Zaphod, waggling his gun.Yes, ‘ said the robot, and they shot him.Zaphod was so surprised that they had to shoot him again before he fell down. (85-86)
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Same as you, Arthur. I hitched a ride. After all, with a degree in maths and another in astrophysics it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday. Sorry I missed the Wednesday lunch date, but I was in a black hole all morning.
— Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts
This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays
— Douglas Adams
Things hit a limit, though, when I was set upon by a pickpocket in a baker’s shop. I didn’t notice that I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.
— Douglas Adams
But what about the End of the Universe? We’ll miss the big moment.”I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish, ” said Zaphod, “nothing but a gnab gib.”A what?”Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let’s get zappy.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.This is:Change.Read it through again and you’ll get it.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
I think we have different value systems.” —Arthur”Well mine’s better.” —Ford
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Very strange people, physicists, ” he said as soon as they were outside again. “In my experience the ones who aren’t actually dead are in some way very ill.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
You mean you’ve been in this same set of rooms here for… two hundred years?’ murmured Richard. ‘You’d think someone would notice, or think it was odd.”Oh, that’s one of the delights of the older Cambridge colleges, ‘ said Reg, ‘everyone is so discreet. If we all went around mentioning what was odd about each other we’d be here till Christmas.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.
— Douglas Adams
Could be. I’m a pretty dangerous dude when I’m cornered.”“Yeah, ” said the voice from under the table, “you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?””Ask a glass of water!
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
But the plans were on display…”“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”“That’s the display department.”“With a flashlight.”“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”“So had the stairs.”“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”“Yes, ” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It’s quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn’t quite that simple. The fried egg isn’t properly a fried egg until it’s been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn’t do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It’s all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Life, ” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before–and thus was the Empire forged.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The waiter approached.’Would you like to see the menu?’ he said. ‘Or would you like to meet the Dish of the Day?”Huh?’ said Ford. ‘Huh?’ said Arthur.’Huh?’ said Trillian.’That’s cool, ‘ said Zaphod. ‘We’ll meet the meat.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The little waiter’s eyebrows wandered about his forehead in confusion.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Beppu (n.)The triumphant slamming shut of a book after reading the final page.
— Douglas Adams, The Deeper Meaning of Liff
Alltami (n.)The ancient art of being able to balance the hot and cold shower taps.
— Douglas Adams, The Deeper Meaning of Liff
If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn’t actually been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoked a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes. I wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply be Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Aberystwyth (n.)A nostalgic yearning which is in itself more pleasant than the thing being yearned for.
— Douglas Adams, The Deeper Meaning of Liff
No, ” he said, “look, it’s very, very simple … all I want … is a cup of tea. You are going to make one for me. Keep quiet and listen.” And he sat. He told the Nutri-Matic about India, he told it about China, he told it about Ceylon. He told it about broad leaves drying in the sun. He told it about silver teapots. He told it about summer afternoons on the lawn. He told it about putting in the milk before the tea so it wouldn’t get scalded. He even told it (briefly) about the history of the East India Company.”So that’s it, is it?” said the Nutri-Matic when he had finished. “Yes, ” said Arthur, “that is what I want.””You want the taste of dried leaves in boiled water?””Er, yes. With milk.””Squirted out of a cow?””Well, in a manner of speaking I suppose …
— Douglas Adams
A five-week sand blizzard?” said Deep Thought haughtily. “You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
OK, so the guy is cool, but… I mean own up, this is barking time, this is major lunch, this is stool approaching critical mass, this is… this is… total vocabulary failure!
— Douglas Adams, Young Zaphod Plays It Safe
Don’t panic and carry a towel
— Douglas Adams
This is flight 121 to Los Angeles. If your travel plans today do not include Los Angeles, now would be the perfect time to disembark.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Why, how much did you tip him?’Ford named a figure again.’I don’t know how much it is, ‘ said Arthur. ‘What’s it worth in pounds sterling? What could it buy you?”It would probably buy you, roughly… er…’ Ford screwed his eyes up as he did some calculations in his head. ‘Switzerland, ‘ he said at last.
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
ART: None. The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough—see point one.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so—but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
But for a moment Dirk had a sense of inifinite loss and sadness that somewhere among the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
So the hours are pretty good then?’ he resumed.The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.Yeah, ‘ he said, ‘but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you’re doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God’s earth, and one’s first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girl that I’m not married to.
— Douglas Adams
Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.
— Douglas Adams
[The Head of Radio Three] had been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase “too much Mozart” was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Such music”, he said. “I’m not religious, but if I were I would say it was like a glimpse into the mind of God. Perhaps it was and i ought to be religious. I have to keep reminding myself that they didn’t create the music, they only created the instrument which could read the score. And the score was life itself. And it’s all up there”.
— Douglas Adams
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
…just because you see something, it doesn’t mean to say it’s there. And if you don’t see something, it doesn’t mean to say it’s not there. It’s only what your senses bring to your attention.
— Douglas Adams
Mr. Beeblebrox, sir, ‘ said the insect in awed wonder, ‘you’re so weird you should be in movies.;’Yeah, ‘ said Zaphod patting the thing on a glittering pink wing, ‘and you, baby, should be in real life.’ The insect paused for a moment
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
He hadn’t realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers for the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones until it now said something it had never said to him before, which was “yes”.
— Douglas Adams
The lights were off so that his heads could avoid looking at each other because neither of them was currently a particular engaging sight, nor had they been since he had made the error of looking into his soul.It had indeed been an error.It had been late one night– of course.It had been a difficult day– of course.There had been soulful music playing on the ship’s sound system– of course.And he had, of course, been slightly drunk.In other words, all the usual conditions that bring on a bout of soul searching had applied, but it had, nevertheless, clearly been an error.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Why should I want to make anything up? Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.
— Douglas Adams
I certainly don’t like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the one we’ve invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they’ve invented in America, who supply their servants with toupees, television stations, and, most important, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
An island, on the other hand, is small. There are fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled [..] So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight – the locals wouldn’t stand a chance.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do.”The sign read:”Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.””It seemed to me, ” said Wonko the Sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It was his subconscious which told him this—that infuriating part of a person’s brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
We have a saying up here. ‘Life is wasted on the living.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living.
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem about changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “future perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.
— Douglas Adams
Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in some extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is seen as evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
Adams has done a bit of everything, from radio to television to designing computer games. Not all of them worked out. “These are life’s little learning experiences, ” he said. “You know what a learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’ “At the end of all this being-determined-to-be-a-jack-of-all-trades, I think I’m better off just sitting down and putting a hundred thousand words in a cunning order.” Adams writes “slowly and painfully.” “People assume you sit in a room, looking pensive and writing great thoughts, ” he said. “But you mostly sit in a room looking panic-stricken and hoping they haven’t put a guard on the door yet.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
The light was only just visible – except of course that there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
He let the curtain drop and the terrible light that had played on his features went off to play somewhere more healthy.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I’m very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson.”Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson?No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
When we told our guide that we didn’t want to go to all the tourist places he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don’t want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Trouble with a long journey like this, ‘ continued the Captain, ‘is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you’re going to say next.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and he would rather have had a chaperon.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
I have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
When the hunt for new sources of energy had at one point got particularly frantic, one bright young chap suddenly spotted that one place which had never used up all its available energy was – the past. And with the sudden rush of blood to the head that such insights tend to induce, he invented a way of mining it that very same night, and within a year huge tracts of the past were being drained of all their energy and simply wasting away. Those who claimed that the past should be left unspoilt were accused of indulgingin an extremely expensive form of sentimentality.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
— Douglas Adams
The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story
You come to me for advice, but you can’t cope with anything you don’t recognize. Hmmm. So we’ll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh Well, business as usual , I suppose.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
It’s the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you’ll see that I’ve underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make the stand out. They’re all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I’ve taken, then maybe you won’t finish up at the end of your life” –she paused, and filled her lungs for a good should–“in a smelly old cave like this!
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
He was following the Earth through its days, drifting with the rhythms of its myriad pulses, seeping through the webs of its life, swelling with its tides, turning with its weight.
— Douglas Adams
Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Don’t blame you, ” said Marvin and counted five hundred and ninety-seven thousand million sheep before falling asleep again a second later.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Conceited little mega-puppy.
— Douglas Adams
The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
How many roads must a man walk down?
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for the planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl slurrp uuuurgh should have a good time. Message repeats.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Zaphod had never heard of this. He believed that he had heard of all the fun things in the Galaxy, so he assumed that the Total Perspective Vortex was not fun.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
Marvin: Look, look, no, just think. They left me – an ordinary, menial robot – to stop you – a gigantic, heavy-duty battle machine – whilst they ran off to save themselves… What do you think they would leave me with? Frogstar Robot: Well, er, something pretty damn devastating I would expect. Marvin: Expect? Oh yes, expect. I’ll tell you what they gave me to protect myself with, shall I? Frogstar Robot: Yes all right. Marvin: Nothing. Frogstar Robot: What? Marvin: Nothing at all. Not an electronic sausage. Frogstar Robot: Well, doesn’t that just take the biscuit!
— Douglas Adams
Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the process of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks. Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does.
— Douglas Adams
Don’t Panic
— Douglas Adams
One moment I was sitting in your ship feeling very depressed, and the next moment I was standing here feeling utterly miserable. An Improbability Field I expect.
— Douglas Adams
The main reception foyer was almost empty but Ford nevertheless weaved his way through it.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
In other words – and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxywide success is founded – their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
The Googleplex Star Thinker is a super-computer from the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity and has the ability to calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle during a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard.The Deep Thought computer call it a pocket calculator in comparison to itself.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
You barbarians!’ he yelled. ‘I’ll sue the council for every penny it’s got! I’ll have you hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled…until…until…until…until you’ve had enough.’Ford was running after him. Very very fast.’And then I will do it again!’ yelled Arthur, ‘And when I’ve finished I will take all the little bits, and I will jump on them!
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn’t recognize huge wodges of human experience. Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn’t—or wasn’t—a word for it, everyone thinks it’s something that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is “woking.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
It faintly irritated him that Zaphod had to impose some ludicrous fantasy on to the scene to make it work for him. All this Margrathea nonsense seemed juvenile. Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I’m afraid you cannot leave, ‘ said Zarniwoop, ‘you are entwined in the Improbability Field. You cannot escape.’ He smiled the smile that Zaphod had wanted to hit and this time Zaphod hit it.
— Douglas Adams
Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place.
— Douglas Adams
The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.
— Douglas Adams
The history of every major galactic civilisation tends to pass through three distinct and recognisable phases, those of Survival, Enquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question How can we eat?, the second by the question Why do we eat?, and the third but the question Where shall we have lunch?
— Douglas Adams
He would insult the Universe. That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
In an infinite Universe anything can happen, ” said Ford, “Even survival. Strange but true.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from the supermarket. You get one of those trolleys which simply will not go in the direction you push it and end up just having to buy completely different stuff. What do you do with it? What do you do with the recipe? She didn’t know.
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem. And so this is the situation we find: a succession of Galactic Presidents who so much enjoy the fun and palaver of being in power that they very rarely notice that they’re not. And somewhere in the shadows behind them—who? Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to do it can be allowed to?
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
But she was finding it increasingly easy to believe that God, if there was a God, and if it was remotely possible that any godlike being who could order the disposition of particles at the creation of the Universe would also be interested in directing traffic on the M4, did not want her to fly to Norway either.
— Douglas Adams
If you describe yourself as “Atheist, ” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god – in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously. It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague wishy-washy Agnosticism – both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much.
— Douglas Adams
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one – more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
When I was young I used to have this nightmare about dying. I used to lie awake at night screaming. All my schoolfriends went to heaven or hell, and I was sent to Southend.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
As soon as Mr. Prosser realized that he was substantially the loser after all, it was as if a weight lifted itself off his shoulders: this was more like the world as he knew it.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
And I write novels!” chimed in the other cop. “Though I haven’t had any of them published yet, so I better warn you, I’m in a meeeean mood!
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Slartibartfast’s study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library.
— Douglas Adams
He wondered if it was safe to grin. Very slowly and carefully, he grinned. It was safe.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
His eyes passed over the solid shapes of the instruments and computers that lined the bridge. They winked away innocently at him. He stared out at the stars, but none of them said a word.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
He was a man who was charged with the work he did in life because he was not one to ask questions – not so much on account of any natural quality of discretion as because he simply could never think of any questions to ask….On the strength of which he had guaranteed himself regular employment for as long as he cared to live.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Zaphod marched quickly down the passageway, nervous as hell, but trying to hide it by striding purposefully.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
He recalls a lot of family worry about what he was going to do, and while he still sent in the occasional sketch to radio shows, he acknowledges that his confidence was extremely low. Despite his subsequent success and wealth, this propensity for a lack of confidence has continued.“I have terrible periods of lack of confidence, ” he explains. “I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view. I briefly did therapy, but after a while I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather—you just have to get on with it.”So has that approach helped him? “Not necessarily, ” he shrugs.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Gilks sighed. ‘You’re a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that, ’ he said, ‘but you make the samemistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion is the better part of valor, so was cowardice is the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn’t, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn’t do it. Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story
Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn’t think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they’ve been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you’ve been introduced to socially.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
I wanted to join Footlights, ” he says. “I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the job was in fact taken.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat.
— Douglas Adams
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical.
— Douglas Adams
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the treesin the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
So, like I said, these are a bunch of really sweet guys, but you wouldn’t want to share a Galaxy with them, not if they’re just gonna keep at it, not if they’re not gonna learn to relax a little. I mean it’s just gonna be continual nervous time, isn’t it, right? Pow, pow, pow, when are they next coming at us? Peaceful coexistence is just right out, right? Get me some water somebody, thank you.”He sat back and sipped reflectively.OK, ” he said, “hear me, hear me. It’s, like, these guys, you know, are entitled to their own view of the Universe. And according to their view, which the Universe forced on them, right, they did right. Sounds crazy, but I think you’ll agree. They believe in …”He consulted a piece of paper which he found in the back pocket of his Judicial jeans.They believe in `peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life, and the obliteration of all other life forms’.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Tertiary Phase
We’re not obsessed by anything, you see, ” insisted Ford.”…””And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.””I care about lots of things, ” said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty.”Such as?””Well, ” said the old man, “life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords.””Would you die for them?””Fjords?” blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. “No.””Well then.””Wouldn’t see the point, to be honest.
— Douglas Adams
Jane, who is much better at reading guide books than I am (I always read them on the way back to see what I missed, it’s often quite a shock), discovered something wonderful in the book she was reading. Did I know, she asked, that Brisbane was originally founded as a penal colony for convicts who committed new offences after they had arrived in Australia ? I spent a good half hour enjoying this single piece of information. It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn’t just jump over and have done with it.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
There was a sort of gallery structure in the roof space which held a bed and also a bathroom which you could actually swing a cat in. But only if it was a reasonably patient cat and didn’t mind a few nasty cracks about the head.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
You know because you’ve been it, and I know because I’m dead and it gives one such a wonderfully uncluttered perspective.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Space, ” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space, listen…
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago, ‘ continued Marvin.Again the pause. ‘Oh d—”And that was with a coffee machine.’ He waited.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
It is a West zone planet which by an inexplicable and somewhat suspicious freak of topography consists almost entirely of subtropical coastline. By an equally suspicious freak of temporal relastatics, it is nearly always Saturday afternoon just before the beach bars close. No adequate explanation for this has been forthcoming from the dominant life forms on Ursa Minor Beta, who spend most of their time attempting to achieve spiritual enlightenment by running round swimming pools, and inviting Investigation Officials from the Galactic Geo-Temporal Control Board to ‘have a nice diurnal anomaly.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don’t. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Forty-two!” yelled Loonquawl. “Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?” “I checked it very thoroughly, ” said the computer, “and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Trilogy
The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It seemed to me, ‘ said Wonko the Sane, ‘that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
In fact it was altogether an odd dog, of uncertain breed, or breeds. It was large and black, but its hair was tufty, its body scrawny and clumsy, and its manner edgy, anxious, verging on the completely neurotic. Whenever it came to a halt for a moment or so, the business of starting up again often seemed to cause it trouble, as if it had difficulty in remembering where it had left each of its legs.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
So what part did I play in all this? Well, none really. They completely ignored me for the whole twenty or thirty minutes. Which was perfectly fine, of course, I didn’t mind. But it did puzzle me, because early every morning they would come yelping and scratching around the doors and windows of my house until I got up and took them for their walk. If anything disturbed the daily ritual, like I had to drive into town, or have a meeting, or fly to England or something, they would get thoroughly miserable and simply not know what to do. Despite the fact that they would always completely ignore me whenever we went on our walks together, they couldn’t just go and have a walk without me. This revealed a profoundly philosophical bent in these dogs that were not mine, because they had worked out that I had to be there in order for them to be able to ignore me properly. You can’t ignore someone who isn’t there, because that’s not what “ignore” means.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
I don’t know why we keep building these fucking dams, ” Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. “Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they’ve all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They’re going to build another eighty of them. It’s just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something. . . . There’s just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy?The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps ‘baffling’ would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief. And yet we keep on building them, and I can’t help but wonder why. I’m convinced that if we go back far enough in the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in there somewhere. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.
— Douglas Adams
Just supposing, ” he said, “just supposing” –he didn’t know what was coming next, so he thought he’d just sit back and listen–“that there was some extraordinary way in which you were very important to me, and that, though you didn’t know it, I was very important to you, but it all went for nothing because we only had five miles and I was a stupid idiot at knowing how to say something very important to someone I’ve only just met and not crash into lorries a the same time, what would you say…” He paused, helplessly, and looked at her.”I should do.
— Douglas Adams
It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.” “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” “You ask a glass of water.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Insanity is a gradual process – don’t rush it.
— Douglas Adams, The More Than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide
City of Vassillian a party of five sage princes with four horses. The princes, who are of course brave, noble and wise, travel widely in distant lands, fight giant ogres, pursue exotic philosophies, take tea with weird gods and rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses before finally announcing that they have achieved enlightenment and that their wanderings are therefore accomplished. The second, and much longer, part of each song would then tell of all their bickerings about which one of them is going to have to walk back. All this lay in the planet’s remote past.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The insurance companies involved had all claimed that this was, by any reasonable standards, an act of God. But, Dirk had argued, which god? Britain was constitutionally a Christian monotheistic state, and therefore any “act of God” defined in a legal document must refer to the Anglican chap in the stained glass and not to some polytheistic thug from Norway.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
She tried to worry that something terrible had happened to him, but didn’t believe it for a moment. Nothing terrible ever happened to him, though she was beginning to think that it was time it damn well did. If nothing terrible happened to him soon maybe she’d do it herself. Now there was an idea.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation – every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
[..] when we get down to the subatomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that wherever we do find something it turns out not to actually something, but only the probability that there may something there.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
And as they drifter up their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do.Physics shook its head and, looking the other way, concentrated on keeping the cards going along the Euston Road and out over towards the Westway flyover, on keeping the street lights lit and on making sure that when somebody on Baker Street dropped a cheeseburger it went splat on the ground.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach, and drifted back to the sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story
I really didn’t foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course–the computer industry didn’t even foresee that the century was going to end.
— Douglas Adams
Perhaps they are singing songs to you, ‘ he said, ‘and I just think they’re asking me questions.’ He paused again. Sometimes he would pause for days, just to see what it was like.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Vell, Zaphod’s just zis guy, you know?
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Trillian did a little research in the ship’s copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness. “Go to it, ” it said, “and good luck.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of maths was put back by years.
— Douglas Adams
Having solved all the major mathematical, physical, chemical, biological, sociological, philosophical, etymological, meteorological and psychological problems of the Universe except for his own, three times over, [Marvin] was severely stuck for something to do, and had taken up composing short dolorous ditties of no tone, or indeed tune. The latest one was a lullaby.Marvin d
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
Share and Enjoy’ is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints Division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium-sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years. The motto stands– or rather stood– in three mile high illuminated letters near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax. Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the offices of many talented young Complaints executives– now deceased.The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read “Go stick your head in a pig, ” and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story
Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn’t ring. Or the phone.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don’t. It’s like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt it. Not even major surgery if it’s done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
the only thing that really gets hurt when you try and change time is yourself.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago, ‘ continued Marvin.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Time travel? I believe there are people regularly travelling back from the future and interfering with our lives on a daily basis. The evidence is all around us. I’m talking about how every time we make an insurance claim we discover that somehow mysteriously the exact thing we’re claiming for is now precisely excluded from our policy.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they’d settled on.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
But now he felt as if the whole world were tipping backwards over his head, and this, he couldn’t help feeling, was a very worrying thing for the world to do.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression “it turns out” to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors “I read somewhere that…” or the craven “they say that…” because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it is research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight. Anyway, where was I?
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship—he merely left his office late one morning, and has never returned since. Though well over a century has now passed, many members of the Guide staff still retain the romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a sandwich and will yet return to put in a solid afternoon’s work. Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr., have therefore been designated acting editors, and Lig’s desk is still preserved the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign that says LIG LURY, JR., EDITOR, MISSING, PRESUMED FED.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
The bowler approached the wicket at a lope, a trot, and then a run. He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher… or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
— Douglas Adams
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
— Douglas Adams
Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.
— Douglas Adams
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.
— Douglas Adams
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it’s still being invented we’re still trying to work out how it works. There’s a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn’t recognise. It’s time for the machines to disappear. The computer’s got to disappear into all of the things we use.
— Douglas Adams
Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn’t like it, it is it.
— Douglas Adams
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
— Douglas Adams
Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
— Douglas Adams
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
— Douglas Adams
Time is bunk.
— Douglas Adams
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
— Douglas Adams
I don’t believe it. Prove it to me and I still won’t believe it.
— Douglas Adams
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
— Douglas Adams
Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.
— Douglas Adams
Because the Internet is so new, we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the Web.
— Douglas Adams
Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.
— Douglas Adams
I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.
— Douglas Adams
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it’s still being invented we’re still trying to work out how it works. There’s a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn’t recognise. It’s time for the machines to disappear. The computer’s got to disappear into all of the things we use.
— Douglas Adams
We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them.
— Douglas Adams
To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.
— Douglas Adams
To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we’re probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.
— Douglas Adams
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