Top 450 Douglas Adams Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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.”

— Douglas Adams

452. “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

453. “I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ’for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

— Douglas Adams

454. “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

455. “Richard stood transfixed for a moment or two, wiped his forehead again, and gently replaced the phone as if it were an injured hamster. His brain began to buzz gently and suck its thumb. Lots of little synapses deep inside his cerebral cortex all joined hands and started dancing around and singing nursery rhymes.”

— Douglas Adams

456. “Charming man,” he said. “I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one...”

— Douglas Adams

457. “Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.”

— Douglas Adams

458. “What I lost, I think, was a whole other life.” “Everybody does that. Every moment of every day. Every single decision we make, every breath we draw, opens some doors and closes many others. Most of them we don’t notice. Some we do. Sounds like you noticed one.”

— Douglas Adams

459. “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” “You ask a glass of water.”

— Douglas Adams

460. “They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just he continual wrenching of experience.”

— Douglas Adams

461. “You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.”

— Douglas Adams

462. “Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to do it can be allowed to?”

— Douglas Adams

463. “It is a farewell gift from the dolphins,” said Wonko in a low quiet voice, “the dolphins whom I loved and studied, and swam with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their language, a task which they seemed to make impossibly difficult, considering the fact that I now realize they were perfectly capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to.”

— Douglas Adams

464. “La scienza ha raggiunto traguardi meravigliosi, certo, ma io preferirei essere felice piuttosto che avere sempre ragione.”

— Douglas Adams

465. “One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living.”

— Douglas Adams

466. “The thing that used to worry him most was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was looking so worried about.”

— Douglas Adams

467. “He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and he would rather have had a chaperon.”

— Douglas Adams

468. “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 movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

— Douglas Adams

469. “But can we trust him?’ he said. ‘Myself, I’d trust him to the end of the Earth,’ said Ford. ‘Oh yes,’ said Arthur, ‘and how far’s that?’ ‘About twelve minutes away,’ said Ford. ‘Come on, I need a drink.”

— Douglas Adams

470. “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

471. “Ford,” he said, “you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.”

— Douglas Adams

472. “If I ever meet myself,” said Zaphod, “I’ll hit myself so hard I won’t know what’s hit me.”

— Douglas Adams

473. “Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multi-dimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.”

— Douglas Adams

474. “Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in 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

475. “Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or as his wife would have it, an idiot.”

— Douglas Adams

476. “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

477. “It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. 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 – while 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

478. “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.”

— Douglas Adams

479. “It might not even have made much difference to them if they’d known exactly how much power the President of the Galaxy actually wielded: none at all. Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.”

— Douglas Adams

480. “Bistromathics is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that time was not an absolute and depended on the observer’s movement in space... so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants.”

— Douglas Adams

481. “Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks. Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop.”

— Douglas Adams

482. “My doctor says that I have a malformed public duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fiber.”

— Douglas Adams

483. “The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if you don’t have any particular need to believe it, then don’t go and look because you won’t enjoy it.”

— Douglas Adams

484. “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 all right.”

— Douglas Adams

485. “It’s just that in your case the consequences of not knowing any of this stuff are particularly terrible, but then, hey, that’s just the way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated.”

— Douglas Adams

486. “If you’ve done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”

— Douglas Adams

487. “What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.” “And are you?” “No. That’s where it all falls down, of course.”

— Douglas Adams

488. “There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?”

— Douglas Adams

489. “That is really amazing.′ he said. ‘That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing I think I’d like to steal it.”

— Douglas Adams

490. “He had a nasty feeling that that might be an idiotic thing t do, but he did it anyway, and sure enough it had turned out to be an idiotic thing to do. You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”

— Douglas Adams

491. “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

492. “It’s a possibility I haven’t ruled out yet,” said Zaphod quietly. “I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.”

— Douglas Adams

493. “There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.”

— Douglas Adams

494. “Big, bulbous, ruddy buildings with vast ballrooms, grand, angular staircases, and as many turrets and crenellations as a recreational condom. The.”

— Douglas Adams