Top 400 Douglas Adams Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.”

— Douglas Adams

102. “For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.”

— Douglas Adams

103. “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.”

— Douglas Adams

104. “Marvin started his ironical humming again. Zaphod hit him and he shut up.”

— Douglas Adams

105. “Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.”

— Douglas Adams

106. “To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”

— Douglas Adams

107. “If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.”

— Douglas Adams

108. “Don’t spin your wheels and stress. Take a deep breath, center yourself and make a plan.”

— Douglas Adams

109. “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 and repair.”

— Douglas Adams

110. “One is never alone with a rubber duck.”

— Douglas Adams

111. “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

112. “It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.”

— Douglas Adams

113. “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

114. “I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.”

— Douglas Adams

115. “I think media are at their most interesting before anybody’s thought of calling them art, when people still think they’re just a load of junk.”

— Douglas Adams

116. “2,000 years ago one man got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if everyone was nice to each other for a change.”

— Douglas Adams

117. “The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don’t even know you are making.”

— Douglas Adams

118. “For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two – and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was...”

— Douglas Adams

119. “In an infinite Universe anything can happen.”

— Douglas Adams

120. “Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word ‘safe’ that I wasn’t previously aware of.”

— Douglas Adams

121. “I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.”

— Douglas Adams

122. “I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.”

— Douglas Adams

123. “Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.”

— Douglas Adams

124. “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

125. “If we see you smoking we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate action.”

— Douglas Adams

126. “Space is really big-REALLY big.”

— Douglas Adams

127. “When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.”

— Douglas Adams

128. “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

— Douglas Adams

129. “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

130. “Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

— Douglas Adams

131. “Even the evil-looking bird perched on a rod in the bar had stopped screeching out the names and addresses of local contract killers, which was a service it provided for free.”

— Douglas Adams

132. “A beach house isn’t just real estate. It’s a state of mind.”

— Douglas Adams

133. “In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.”

— Douglas Adams

134. “We’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.”

— Douglas Adams

135. “The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.”

— Douglas Adams

136. “If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.”

— Douglas Adams

137. “Life! Don’t talk to me about life!”

— Douglas Adams

138. “We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.”

— Douglas Adams

139. “Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy, Canada is like an intelligent, 35 year old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson.”

— Douglas Adams

140. “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

141. “I don’t believe it. Prove it to me and I still won’t believe it.”

— Douglas Adams

142. “I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.”

— Douglas Adams

143. “High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.”

— Douglas Adams

144. “Presidents don’t have power. Their job is to draw attention away from it.”

— Douglas Adams

145. “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

146. “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

147. “The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.”

— Douglas Adams

148. “The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for.”

— Douglas Adams

149. “A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.”

— Douglas Adams

150. “I can see we’re in for a fabulous evening’s apocalypse.”

— Douglas Adams