Top 400 Douglas Adams Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ’em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.”

— Douglas Adams

252. “The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn’t ring. Or the phone.”

— Douglas Adams

253. “A computer chatted to itself in alarm as it noticed an airlock open and close itself for no apparent reason. This was because Reason was in fact out to lunch.”

— Douglas Adams

254. “A mobile phone needs a manual in the way that a teacup doesn’t.”

— Douglas Adams

255. “Will you stop counting!? snarled Zaphod. ‘Yes,’ said Ford Prefect, ’in three minutes and thirty-five seconds.”

— Douglas Adams

256. “People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.”

— Douglas Adams

257. “How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present.”

— Douglas Adams

258. “When the girl sitting at the next table looked away from a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened.”

— Douglas Adams

259. “I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer...”

— Douglas Adams

260. “The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realized that it was a system at all and that it wasn’t something that was just there.”

— Douglas Adams

261. “Many respectable physicists said that they weren’t going to stand for this – partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn’t get invited to those sort of parties.”

— Douglas Adams

262. “It’s good to leave your room super-messy when you’re away. Whoever tries to break into your room will thought it has already been ransacked.”

— Douglas Adams

263. “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

264. “Being virtually killed by a virtual laser in a virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.”

— Douglas Adams

265. “I am terribly proud of-I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA!”

— Douglas Adams

266. “Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.”

— Douglas Adams

267. “The future of computer power is pure simplicity.”

— Douglas Adams

268. “He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.”

— Douglas Adams

269. “I’m 48, which is a bit of a shock to me. Why only last year I thought I was a precocious young thing!”

— Douglas Adams

270. “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

271. “He turned slowly like a fridge door opening.”

— Douglas Adams

272. “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

273. “I don’t say that I don’t believe in God because that implies that there is a God for me not to believe in.”

— Douglas Adams

274. “Cyberspace is – or can be – a good, friendly and egalitarian place to meet.”

— Douglas Adams

275. “The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.”

— Douglas Adams

276. “Believe me, it is a great deal better to find cast-iron proof that you’re innocent than to languish in a cell hoping that the police – who already think you’re guilty – will find it for you.”

— Douglas Adams

277. “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.”

— Douglas Adams

278. “That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herself that that was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final real ulimate it.”

— Douglas Adams

279. “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

280. “Here, for whatever reason, is the world. And here it stays. With me on it.”

— Douglas Adams

281. “There was a terribly ghastly silence. There was a terribly ghastly noise. There was a terribly ghastly silence.”

— Douglas Adams

282. “Pardon me for breathing, which I never do any way so I don’t know why I bother to say it, oh God, I’m so depressed.”

— Douglas Adams

283. “If there was one thing life had taught her it was that there are times when you do not go back for your bag and times when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the two types of occasion.”

— Douglas Adams

284. “Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.”

— Douglas Adams

285. “I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it’s less good than what I do, there’s no point in reading it, if it’s better than what I do it makes me depressed.”

— Douglas Adams

286. “Stotting is jumping upward with all four legs simultaneously. My advice: do not die until you’ve seen a large black poodle stotting in the snow.”

— Douglas Adams

287. “I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?”

— Douglas Adams

288. “In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal.”

— Douglas Adams

289. “Conceited little mega-puppy.”

— Douglas Adams

290. “Marvin was humming ironically because he hated humans so much.”

— Douglas Adams

291. “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

292. “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

293. “Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe there is a reason.”

— Douglas Adams

294. “Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes our ends.”

— Douglas Adams

295. “Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.”

— Douglas Adams

296. “Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.”

— Douglas Adams

297. “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

298. “He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.”

— Douglas Adams

299. “We’ll meet the meat.”

— Douglas Adams

300. “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