Douglas Adams Quotes
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. "
"All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss."
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"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. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be."
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. 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."
"Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to."
"Even the sceptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. 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."
"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
"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."
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
"'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and
without faith I am nothing.'
'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have
evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments,
you don't. QED.'
'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff
of logic."
"In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move."
"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."
"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 -- whilst 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."
"It is not the fall that kills you. it's the sudden stop at the end."
"It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an airport' appear."
"It wasn't merely that their left hand didn't always know what their right hand was doing, so to speak; quite often their right hand had a pretty hazy notion as well."
"Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast."
"Men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Spirits were brave, men boldly split infinitives that no man had split before. Thus was the Empire forged."
"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 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? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working."
"Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp."
"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."
"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place."
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
"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."
"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody 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."
"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so."
"You know, it's at times like this when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man
from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd
listened to what my mother told me when I was young!"
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen!"
"Very deep. You should send that into Reader's Digest, they've got a page for people like you."
"Why stop now just when I'm hating it?"