“Don’t Panic.”
— Douglas Adams
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
“Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
“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.”
“So long, and thanks for all the fish.”
“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”
“There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.”
“All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.”
“It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.”
“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.”
“Life is wasted on the living.”
“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”
“42 is a nice number that you can take home and introduce to your family.”
“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.”
“We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.”
“Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.”
“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.”
“To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.”
“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer.”
“Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.”
“Earth: mostly harmless.”
“In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.”
“Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons.”
“It’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end.”
“If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.”
“The single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood.”
“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”
“I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”
“Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there’s no point trying to look in that direction because it won’t be coming from there.”
“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.”
“A cup of tea would restore my normality.”
“The difference between us and a computer is that, the computer is blindingly stupid, but it is capable of being stupid many, many million times a second.”
“This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
“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.”
“Funny, how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.”
“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”
“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.”
“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”
“Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
“We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.”
“You can’t dodge your responsibilities by saying they don’t exist!”
“Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.”
“Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.”
“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”
“Time travel, by its very nature, was invented in all periods of history simultaneously.”
“We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway.”
“Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
“I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.”
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
“We all like to congregate at boundary conditions. Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where bodies meet mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other.”
“Who is this god person anyway?”
“Democracy is all about not electing the wrong man-eating lizard.”
“For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and satisfied, drove on into the night.”
“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
“There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world.”
“How do you know you’re having fun if there’s no one watching you have it?”
“And so the Universe ended.”
“How many roads must a man walk down?”
“There are two things you should remember when dealing with parallel universes. One, they’re not really parallel, and two, they’re not really universes.”
“Space is unimaginably big.”
“Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?”
“Capital Letters Were Always The Best Way Of Dealing With Things You Didn’t Have A Good Answer To.”
“The mere thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.”
“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.”
“There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.”
“Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.”
“Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don’t quite work yet is just not worth it for end users, however much fun it is for nerds.”
“I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it’s art while it’s being created.”
“It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‘I could have thought of that’ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.”
“She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.”
“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.”
“I find that writing is a constant battle with exactly the same problems you’ve always had.”
“Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn’t just jump over and have done with it.”
“The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.”
“Six pints of bitter, said Ford Prefect. And quickly please, the world’s about to end.”
“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.”
“It all sounds rather naive and sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is snarl and take drugs.”
“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”
“Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila.”
“Would you like me to go and stick my head in a bucket of water?”
“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.”
“The Macintosh may only have 10% of the market, but it is clearly the top 10%.”
“Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.”
“But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we’re driving.”
“Beauty doesn’t have to be about anything. What’s a vase about? What’s a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart’s Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?”
“Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.”
“Please call me Eddie if it will help you to relax.”
“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?”
“I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: “Macintosh – We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end”.”
“Marvin started his ironical humming again. Zaphod hit him and he shut up.”
“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.”
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