Top 400 Douglas Adams Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 9

201. “As a result of all this hardship, dirt, thirst, and wombats, you would expect Australians to be a dour lot. Instead, they are genial, jolly, cheerful, and always willing to share a kind word with a stranger, unless they are an American.”

— Douglas Adams

202. “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

203. “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide has not been an opera. It has however been a tapestry, if you count a woven bath towel as a tapestry.”

— Douglas Adams

204. “The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.”

— Douglas Adams

205. “You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy’s a fun place. You’ll need to have this fish in your ear.”

— Douglas Adams

206. “The dew has fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning.”

— Douglas Adams

207. “Shee, you guys are so unhip it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off.”

— Douglas Adams

208. “God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining.”

— Douglas Adams

209. “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.”

— Douglas Adams

210. “I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say.”

— Douglas Adams

211. “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

212. “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

213. “The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome.”

— Douglas Adams

214. “It’s part of the shape of the Universe. I only have to talk to somebody and they begin to hate me.”

— Douglas Adams

215. “My own strategy is to find a car, or the nearest equivalent, which looks as if it knows where it’s going and follow it. I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be.”

— Douglas Adams

216. “I don’t go to mythical places with strange men.”

— Douglas Adams

217. “You can’t possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you’re a fool.”

— Douglas Adams

218. “Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn’t him.”

— Douglas Adams

219. “Put away your worries, the world is a good and perfect place. It is in fact very easy.”

— Douglas Adams

220. “Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor, at least no one worth speaking of.”

— Douglas Adams

221. “I wanted to be John Cleese. It took me some time to realise that the job was taken.”

— Douglas Adams

222. “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

223. “Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth.”

— Douglas Adams

224. “I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed.”

— Douglas Adams

225. “The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basic sherry, but refuses to catch your eye.”

— Douglas Adams

226. “The Hollywood process is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.”

— Douglas Adams

227. “I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.”

— Douglas Adams

228. “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

229. “I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg Ron stole Meggy’s heart away and I got Sidney’s leg.”

— Douglas Adams

230. “The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time ever.”

— Douglas Adams

231. “Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.”

— Douglas Adams

232. “The reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for converts: they know that people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of guidance.”

— Douglas Adams

233. “Why’ is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it. The alphabet does not go ‘A B C D What? When? How?’ but it does go ‘V W X Why? Z.”

— Douglas Adams

234. “Even light, which travels so fast it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars.”

— Douglas Adams

235. “These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.”

— Douglas Adams

236. “The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.”

— Douglas Adams

237. “There was one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole.”

— Douglas Adams

238. “Here’s what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colourless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.”

— Douglas Adams

239. “Siamese Cats have a way of staring at you. Those who have walked in on the Queen cleaning her teeth will know the expression.”

— Douglas Adams

240. “That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.”

— Douglas Adams

241. “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 broadminded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with.”

— Douglas Adams

242. “If I were not an atheist, I think I would have to be a Catholic because if it wasn’t the forces of natural selection that designed fish, It must have been an Italian.”

— Douglas Adams

243. “Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.”

— Douglas Adams

244. “I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style.”

— Douglas Adams

245. “No. No games. He wanted her and didn’t care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.”

— Douglas Adams

246. “Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game.”

— Douglas Adams

247. “We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books.”

— Douglas Adams

248. “There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, “Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.” It’s funny.”

— Douglas Adams

249. “Ha, but my life is a box of wormgears.”

— Douglas Adams

250. “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