Life, the Universe & everything.

Quotes from Douglas Adams, one of the funniest guys that ever lived.

RIP 1952 - 2001.
So long, & thanks for all the books.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

"Arthur hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realised there was a contradiction there and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.”

“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.”

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

“God puts an apple tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden and says, do what you like guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha." It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it... because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.”

“He shifted his weight from foot to foot, but it was equally uncomfortable on each.”

“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.”

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

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.”

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

“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 favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.”

“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.”

“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.”

"INFINITE: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that, in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big" time. Infinity is so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.”

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”

“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 a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made p******** should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Life is wasted on the living.”

“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.”

“Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally unfucked-up personality.”

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.”

“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.”

“The difficulty with this conversation is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.”

“The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phase, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?”

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

“The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

“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.”

“The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.”

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone 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.”

“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.”

“Time is bunk.”

“Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you traveled. This will come to you as a profound shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister.”

“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”

“We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.”

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”

“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.”

“It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase "As pretty as an airport" appear.”

“If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to The Door and it wasn't there...what then?

The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of belief? The Door would still be there, even if the Door was not.”

"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."

“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 ...”

“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.”

“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!”

“...was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking... he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomably into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

“Anything that happens, happens.

Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.

Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.

It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.”

“Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.”

“Who is this God person anyway?”

“On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life, and the obliteration of all other life forms.”

“Well I think we've sorted all that out now. If you'd like to know, I can tell you that in your Universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and there's all sorts of stuff going on in dimensions 13 to 22 that you really wouldn't want to know about. All you really need to know for the moment is that the Universe is a lot more complicated then you might think.”

"`...You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.'

`But the plans were on display...'

`On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.'

`That's the display department.'

`With a torch.'

`Ah, well the lights had probably gone.'

`So had the stairs.'

`But look you found the notice didn't you?'

`Yes,' said Arthur, `yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".'"

"`Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.'

`Very deep,' said Arthur, `you should send that in to the "Reader's Digest". They've got a page for people like you.'"

"`This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer, `I never could get the hang of Thursdays.'"

"Pages one and two [of Zaphod's p********ial speech] had been salvaged by a Damogran Frond Crested Eagle and had already become incorporated into an extraordinary new form of nest which the eagle had invented. It was constructed largely of papier mache and it was virtually impossible for a newly hatched baby eagle to break out of it. The Damogran Frond Crested Eagle had heard of the notion of survival of the species but wanted no truck with it."

“this is obviously some strange usage of the word "safe" that I wasn't previously aware of.”

"`You'd better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasently like being drunk.'

`What's so unpleasent about being drunk?'

`You ask a glass of water.'"

"If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.'"

"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 spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?'"

"The fronting for the eighty-yard long marble-topped bar had been made by stitching together nearly twenty thousand Antarean Mosaic Lizard skins, despite the fact that the twenty thousand lizards concerned had needed them to keep their insides in."

"`We've got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.'

The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford.

`Stick it up your nose,' he said.

`Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know,' insisted the girl, `Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?'"

“What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.”

"Ford grabbed him by the lapels of his dressing gown and spoke to him as slowly and distinctly and patiently as if he were somebody from a telephone company accounts department."

“Arthur's consciousness approached his body as from a great distance, and reluctantly. It had had some bad times in there. Slowly, nervously, it entered and settled down into its accustomed position.”

"His eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. He wasn't certain if this was because they were trying to see more clearly, or if they simply wanted to leave at this point."

"There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind."

"`You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?'

`Really?' said Arthur. `No I didn't. For what offence?'

Trillian frowned. `What do you mean, offence?'

`I see.'"

"`She hit me on the head with the rock again.'

`I think I can confirm that that was my daughter.'

`Sweet kid.'

`You have to get to know her,' said Arthur.

`She eases up does she?'

`No,' said Arthur, `but you get a better sense of when to duck.'"

"The beak was a major piece of armoury. It was a beak that would frighten any animal on earth, even one that was already dead and in a tin."

"`Could we perhaps take a snake bite detector with us to Komodo?'

`Course you can, course you can. Take as many as you like. Won't do you a blind bit of good because they're only for Australian snakes.'

`So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly, then?'

He blinked at me as if I was stupid.

`Well what do you think you do?' he said. `You die of course. That's what deadly means.'"

"Mark turned and asked a passenger behind us if these planes ever crashed. Oh yes, he was told, but not to worry - there hadn't been a serious crash now in months."

"Virtually everything we were told in Indonesia turned out not to be true, sometimes almost immediately. The only exception to this was when we were told that something would happen immediately, in which case it turned out not to be true over an extended period of time."

"Komodo dragons sleep headfirst in large burrows. It is a very, very, very bad idea to even think of pulling its tail."

“Plenty of people did not care for him much, but then there is a huge difference between disliking somebody -- maybe even disliking them a lot -- and actually shooting them, strangling them, dragging them through the fields and setting their house on fire. It was a difference which kept the vast majority of the population alive from day to day.”

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own laws.”

“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 big corporations are suddenly taking notice of the web, and their reactions have been slow. Even the computer industry failed to see the importance of the Internet, but that's not saying much. Let's face it, the computer industry failed to see that the century would end.”

“One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work - supposing you're trying to find out how a cat works--you take that cat apart to see how it works, what you've got in your hands is a non-working cat. The cat wasn't a sort of clunky mechanism that was susceptible to our available tools of analysis.”

“For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.”

“The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand million, nine hundred and ninety- nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety- nine times out of a billion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.”

“Since this Galaxy began, vast civilisations have risen and fallen, risen and fallen, risen and fallen so often that it's quite tempting to think that life in the Galaxy must be (a) something akin to seasick - space-sick, time sick, history sick or some such thing, and (b) stupid.”

“It wasn't his job to worry about that, though. It was his job to do his job, which was to do his job. If that led to a certain narrowness of vision and circularity of thought then it wasn't his job to worry about such things.”

“All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.”

“Computer, if you don't open that exit hatch this moment I shall zap straight off to your major data banks and reprogram you with a very large axe.”

“I think all cats are wild cats. They just act tame if they think they'll get a saucer of milk out of it.”

“Look, would it save a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”

“Now, either you all give yourselves up now and let us beat you up a bit, though not very much of course because we are firmly opposed to needless violence, or we blow up this entire planet and possibly one or two we noticed on our way out here!”

“Rome wasn't burned in a day.”

“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.”

“The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making.”

“There is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.”

“Totally mad. Utter nonsense. But we'll do it because it's brilliant nonsense.”

“We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.”

“Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters, which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.”

“If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil does.”

"Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in..."

"...he was at least twice as unbalanced now, and quite liable to fall off whatever it is that well-balanced people are supposed to be balancing on."

"In his dreams he was walking late at night along the East Side, beside the river which had become so extravagantly polluted that new life forms were now emerging from it spontaneously, demanding welfare and voting rights"

"Busy executives often didn’t have time for a full-time wife and family and would just rent them for weekends."

"It was impossible for Arthur to know this, but he just went ahead and knew it anyway."

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer."